Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Surrounded by reptiles - and I don't mean the alligators

Snickering over it being an “Alligator Alcatraz,” Florida AttGen James Uthmeier announced plans for a "one stop shop" at a decrepit airfield in the Everglades with the goal of confining 1,000 kidnapped immigrants. 

Environmentalists were of course and quite properly outraged by the plan and the damage it will do to the environmentally-prized and -sensitive region while other folks decried the inhumanity involved - as if either mattered to the conglomeration of ass-kissers, boot-lickers, grifters, and self-dealers who make up the royal court of The Spray Tan Who Would Be King.

The site would be one of several in the state to hold imprison up to 5,000 people to be removed from our insufficiently white population as part of the state's contribution toward enacting the xenophobic rantings of their liege.

But I have to admit what stood out to me was how these deportation dungeons would be paid for. Reports the Post:
"The state can be reimbursed for the estimated $450 million cost of the detention centers by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to DHS."
According to Department for the Protection of the Fatherland secretary and cosplay addict Kristi Noem, the money would come from FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, which was created by Congress to provide grants to groups and state/local governments who provide services to immigrants awaiting legal proceedings. That is, it was created at least with the idea of helping immigrants who are going through the legal system - aka "doing it the right way." Instead, it will now be used for what bluntly amount to prisons intended to cage people until they can be kicked out.

So FEMA will pay for them. FEMA, the agency that is supposed to, designed to, created to, assist local communities in recovering from natural disasters, the agency that is perpetually short of money to cover costs related to our climate-change-driven storms, floods, and fires, the agency whose bosses confirmed just a few days earlier that there would not be any aid to the state of Washington for recovery from a bomb cyclone that hit in November, that FEMA is going to pay to for this latest paean to perversity.

On the other hand, I guess we shouldn't be the least surprised since King Donald the I (that's a pronoun, not a Roman numeral) intends to "wind down" FEMA "after hurricane season" - doesn't want to risk impacting Florida - and assume personal control over who gets help and how much which I'm sure will be distributed on exactly the sort of impartial, non-partisan standard for which he is so famous.

As a footnote to all this, we have GOT to talk about "remigration."

Does Sarah McBride speak for the trans community? "Moderates" sure hope so.

I suppose this cold be considered a type of full disclosure: This was was prompted by Erin Reed’s piece on Rep. Sara McBride’s “New York Times” interview with Ezra Klein.

I admit to a good deal of sympathy for Sarah McBride in that when she first entered Congress, she indicated she wanted to be seen as "the Gentlelady from Delaware," not "the transgender member of the House." That, of course, while understandable was nonetheless impossible and the first thing she encountered as soon as she passed through the door was the bathroom business, followed by daily humiliations like repeated references to "Mr. McBride." So yes, it's a tough path she's negotiating. Credit her with trying to do it with grace.

The problem here is that with her interview with Ezra Klein she now has allowed herself to be presented as some sort of voice of the community, the "most politically powerful transgender official in the country" (says Faux News), someone who is not merely expressing some personal opinions about tactics (some of which she clearly has not thought through) but communicating Significant Views worthy of Serious Consideration by the Serious People. The choruses of "But Sarah McBride said" and "As Sarah McBride said" are already emerging.

If she now wants to be seen as a community leader, she damn well should have pushed harder on behalf of, as she herself put it (referring to Delaware), the people she represents. If she doesn't, if her goal is just to be "the Gentlelady from Delaware," perhaps in hope of quietly normalizing her presence and that of those who may follow, then she should have refused the interview.

Not only because McBride shows serious signs of already falling into old-style Washington insider ways (such as referring to advocates by the dismissive epithet "the groups"), but because she betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the dynamics of social change. Specifically, she says fighting across a broad front "regardless of whether the public is ready ... misunderstands the role that social movements have in maintaining proximity to public opinion."

That is utter nonsense. Being where the public is not, being where the public is not immediately ready to go, is exactly the role of social movements. It is their whole purpose.

Indeed, in writing this I recalled writing some years ago that in an odd sort of way, the goal of any movement for social justice is to lose because you should always be somewhat unpopular, somewhat beyond where the public is prepared at that moment to go - and if you do succeed in moving them to where you are, such that they are raising their own voices and you are no longer speaking to them or to power on their behalf, it's time either to shift to a different issue or to a sharper position on the same one. Because there is always more to do.*

The point here is that no movement for justice ever gained broader acceptance by the self-defeating strategy of "follow[ing] the polls." That is a road not to progress but to irrelevance and at best stasis. And whatever it's uses in military campaigns, "strategic retreat" in a political movement is simply giving up ground and at best losing more slowly.

The history of gaining rights is one of leading, not following; is one of struggle, not of settling; is one where compromises follow campaigns, they do not precede them - and, importantly, where such compromises are found only in gains, not losses.

I could go on about this for some time - I certainly have in the past - but to save myself some typing and repetition, I'm going to refer you to my piece called "Newsom and Moulton: A Tale of Two Trimmers" (I'm sure you can guess the topic) which contains some discussion related to "compromise" actually meaning slow-motion surrender.

Instead, I'll repeat something I've said so many times that I should have it tattooed on my forehead to save time:

The movement for peace and social justice in this country has been at its strongest and most influential when we have spoken the truth without giving a flying damn if anyone was "offended" or not. We didn't build a movement against the Indochina War or for civil rights, women's equality, or a cleaner environment by worrying about how we'd be received by the bigots, sexists, or greedy corporate bosses - or how we'd "look" or who we'd "turn off" if we labeled the discriminators and despoilers for what they were.

And while that referred to movements of the dreaded '60s, it has remained true through all the movements since it was first written about 35 years ago. And, I suspect, will continue to be so.

Which Sara McBride does not understand. Know this clearly: I do not fault her for this. As I said above, she may well see her role is to do her job as a congresswoman and to fit in such that being transgender is no longer remarkable. If so, I wish her the best but I am also old enough to remember the Mattachine Society, which adopted a very similar "we're just like you" strategy only to have to wait for decades until such as Stonewall and Act Up! actually get the needle moving.

No matter; Sarah McBride has to decide how she personally will deal with her own situation. But she is not cut out to be - and may well not want to be - a community voice or leader. And she should not be made into one.

*I used to enjoy telling people my political philosophy was that of a “socialist-anarchist-communalist-capitalist-eclectic-iconoclast.” Part of the point was the “iconoclast” - because I’d say that there ever was a society designed along the lines I imagine, the first thing I’d do is to examine it for its shortcomings that needed to be addressed. The I Jing says “the only thing that doesn’t change is that everything else changes.” My version is “the only ultimate answer is that there is no other ultimate answer.” There’s always more to do.

Thursday, June 19, 2025

Trans folks get Screw-mettied

A few observations on US v. Skrmetti, the case over Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth, drawn from the reporting from, among others sources, Chris Geidner (Law Dork) and Erin Reed (Erin in the Morning)

For those terminally uninformed, the state of Tennessee had passed a law barring medical gender-affirming care for anyone under the age of 18. On June 18, in a 6-3 split along the usual lines, SCOTUS upheld the law
Okay, one thought is that unlike Geidner, who called the "logic" of primary author John Roberts "circular," I'd liken it more to a spiral, spinning further and further out beyond the bounds of reasoned thought in pursuit of a predetermined conclusion. And that was mild compared to Mark Joseph Stern writing at Slate, who called Roberts' ruling "an incoherent mess of contradiction and casuistry," a "travesty," and "a series of half-arguments and specious assumptions stitched together into one analytic trainwreck."

Another thought is that in saying the law is not discriminatory based on sex because it denies treatment to both trans boys and trans girls, the ruling clearly echoes (for not the only time) the bigoted (and rejected) defense to bans on same-sex marriage which claimed those laws did not discriminate on the basis of sex because gays and lesbians could still get married, provided it was to each other.

A third arises from Roberts saying the law "does not restrict the administration of puberty blockers or hormones to individuals 18 and over." That is, you can get puberty blockers, but only after puberty is or is essentially complete. Kind of like saying you can vote in an election provided you do it after the votes have been counted.

Fourth, the decision spouts some blather about evolving standards and there are still, y’know, “questions” and some “controversial” stuff, argued in the face of the overwhelming scientific consensus on the basics: Puberty blockers and HRT work, can be used safely, gender-affirming care leads to improved lives for the vast, vast majority of people affected, and regret rates are, compared to other medical and surgical interventions, remarkably low. But there are still bozos and bigots spinning tales, so there is, yeah, “controversy” and lack of absolutely perfect knowledge so we must give full weight to “both sides” and approve bans where they exist. And I look forward to a SCOTUS suit of someone arguing a school can’t teach students that the Earth is a globe because of the “controversy” about if it is flat or not.

Finally, there is this horrifying statement from the head of the Sleazy Six: "SB1 does not exclude any individual from medical treatments on the basis of transgender status. Rather, it removes one set of diagnoses from the range of treatable conditions.”

If the first sentence there has any coherent meaning at all - which is quite an assumption - it's that banning trans-related health care is not discriminatory because a trans person can't be denied treatment for, say, diabetes on the grounds of being trans. And, it would follow, it's not discriminatory to deny a diabetic treatment because they can still be treated for cancer.

But the second sentence is the really horrifying one. Its actual argument is that any category of person can be banned from needed treatment by "remov[ing] one set of diagnoses" - the very ones that define the condition for which treatment is sought - "from the range of treatable conditions,” even as it effectively acknowledges these are valid medical diagnoses. "You've been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes? Sorry not sorry, we've decided that diagnosis cannot be treated."

The sheer inhumane depravity, the cold-blooded indifference to the welfare or even, given the suicide statistics, the survival of trans people revealed by that passage is difficult to grasp.

Oh, and as a footnote: Any time a right-wingers comes at you defending a law or policy with any form of “all it does is,” as the Scurrilous Six do here, you can be damn sure it does a hell of a lot more.

Friday, June 13, 2025

Burning down the future

The Spray Tan Who Would Be King has declared open war on the future.
Not his future, what does he care, he will not live to see the effects of his self-glorifying ineptitude.
And not the future of his apostles and Wormtongue-whisperers, whose gaze does not extend beyond the limits of their personal greeds, hatreds, and schemes, who see the "king" as a means to their warped ends.
Nor that of the bootlickers, acolytes, and court jesters, all of who have long since abandoned any shred of independent thought or self-respect.
No, I mean The Future.
On June 11, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it was changing its name to the Environmental Destruction Agency with the announcement that the agency
is proposing to repeal all “greenhouse gas” emissions standards for the power sector under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act (CAA) and to repeal amendments to the 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) that directly result in coal-fired power plants having to shut down.
That is, it proposes to allow power plants to emit as much climate-destroying greenhouse gases as they feel like, with the argument being (if you can believe it but I bet you can, considering) that because it can't be said with assurance of just how significant an impact on global climate change is driven by US-based fossil-fuel power plants, those emissions can't be regulated at all.1
 To show the science-based, non-political nature of the change, the announcement quotes EDA Administrator Lee Zeldin as saying the "Biden-era regulations have imposed massive costs" on the poor, beleaguered, barely-getting-by fossil fuel industry and their "primary purpose" was "to destroy industries that didn't align with their narrow-minded climate change zealotry" and to "regulate coal, oil and gas out of existence.”
The reactions from actual environmentalists were not kind.
- The plan is a "reckless betrayal," "ugly and unpatriotic," "cynical," and "dangerous." - Moms Clean Air Force director Dominique Browning
- It's "destructive," "reckless," and "fan[s] the flames of extreme heat and wildfires." - Center for Biological Diversity environmental health attorney Ryan Maher
- It's "completely reprehensible," "trad[es] American lives for campaign dollars," and is "an assault on our health and future." - Sierra Club climate policy director Patrick Drupp
- It's "astoundingly shameful," "galling," "sacrifices the public good," and would leave "no meaningful path to meet global climate goals." - Julie McNamara of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Climate and Energy Program
This announcement came on the same day that The Guardian reported that climate.gov, the highly-respected source of information and education about climate change run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has been effectively shut down.
Every member of the content production staff was fired as of May 31, meaning that other than (maybe) some already-prepared material to go up later this month, there will be no new content, no new reports on studies, no new refutations of denialist bullshit.
Worse, two web developers were kept on, raising the specter that the site may be maintained, but turned into an outlet for fossil-fuel industry propaganda and conspiracist trash.
Oh, and speaking of NOAA, on June 5 the agency and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (at UCal, San Diego) stated, as reported by CommonDreams.org,
the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere peaked above 430 parts per million in 2025 - the highest it has been in millions of years.
In fact, in more than 30 million years, according to Ralph Keeling, director the Scripps CO2 Program, who responded to the study's findings with a typical scientist's understatement: “Another year, another record. It’s sad.”
Sad indeed, but it's more, though. A new study, published June 2 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment says that coastal communities in North Carolina are already experiencing a frequency of high-tide flooding "an order of magnitude greater" than the official numbers. Although the immediate cause was shortcomings in measuring rainfall runoff and the effects of local drainage infrastructure, still, as the Washington Post noted in its coverage, the study
offers insights into a reality that a growing number of coastal communities will face, or already are facing: that infrastructure built for another time and another climate is not equipped to handle the higher tides and persistent flooding fueled by rising seas.
Part of the issue with rising sea levels, of course, is that warming climate yields warming water yields expanding water yields sea level rise. Another and potentially much larger issue is melting ice caps, particularly in Greenland and Antarctica. And according to work also published in Communications Earth & Environment, this one on May 20, the current Paris Climate Agreement target of limiting warming to 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels is too damn high and
even current climate forcing (+1.2°C), if sustained, is likely to generate several meters of sea-level rise over the coming centuries, causing extensive loss and damage to coastal populations and challenging the implementation of adaptation measures
trying to deal with the result of melting of ice sheets. The study concluded that the "safe limit" of warming for ice sheets is not 1.5°C or even 1.2°C but more like 1°C "and maybe a little less," the "safe limit" being defined by study co-author Jonathan Bamber as "one which allows some level of adaptation, rather than catastrophic inland migration and forced migration." Exceed that limit and
it becomes extremely challenging for any kind of adaptation, and you're going to see massive land migration on scales that we've never witnessed in modern civilization,
he said.
And don't just think of the migration. Think of the hunger it will cause. Think of the pain, the suffering, the starvation, it will cause. Think of the wars it will cause from conflicts over land, over water, over resources, over territory, the ethnic wars over "foreign invaders."
That is the world that King Donald in his lust for vengeance and power, that corporate CEOs in their "warmed and well-lighted offices"2 with their lust for more! more! more!, that the sniveling party sycophants who would rather see the world burn than have to find a different job, that the worshipful buffoons who think that wearing a red cap is a solution to their shrinking futures, that is the world they would leave to the generations to come, that is the world that we, we, that we will leave to our children, our grandchildren if we are not willing to face what is before us.
Lead author on this study Chris Stokes noted that "we only have to go back to the early 1990s to find a time when the ice sheets looked far healthier" and global warming was within that safe limit.
So let me ask you this: Think of (or do some looking into) the 1990s, the level of conveniences you had than, the standard of living, the available technology. Then ask yourself this: Was that way of life so terrible that you would sacrifice a world to avoid living that way again?
If your answer is yes, then you are a waste of air and I don't think I believe you. If your answer is no, then know that precisely because of the technological advances of those past 35 years we can leave a livable world behind us if - but only if - we are prepared to pay the price (and I mean invest the money, the tax money, because the corporations sure as hell aren't going to do it willingly) and probably do without some tech-y but unnecessary geegaws.
The choice is stark, but there is a clear right one and no it does not involve "starving in the dark" but it will likely involve some sacrifice. I can only hope we're up to it.
 
1According to the EPA (to the extent it can still be trusted to not downplay the issue, 24% of US greenhouse gas emissions are from electricity production, of which 60% is from burning fossil fuels. That means that 15% of all US greenhouse gas emissions arise from fossil-fuel burning electric power plants. Not what I'd call "not significant."

2"The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices." - C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters


Wednesday, June 04, 2025

Silent encroachment

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison, June 1778
 
Here is something on-going which has gotten not near enough attention even as people are kinda sorta aware of it in particular circumstances.
 
We are facing a new wave of bills and lawsuits designed to limit and repress First Amendment rights to free speech and public assembly.
 
People are aware, I expect, of moves to restrict (properly read as drive out of existence) campus protest against the genocide in Gaza and/or support of Palestinian rights. But that is not the intended end. Just like sports and bathroom bans are not the actual goal of the transphobes and transmisiacs but are just the "foot on the door," the "camel's nose," to much more far-reaching ends, so are these laws and regulations.
 
The Guardian offered a brief rundown a few weeks ago, declaring
[a]nti-protest bills that seek to expand criminal punishments for constitutionally protected peaceful protests ... have spiked since Trump’s inauguration.

Forty-one new anti-protest bills across 22 states have been introduced since the start of the year ... according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) tracker.

This year’s tally includes 32 bills across 16 states since Trump returned to the White House, with five federal bills targeting college students, anti-war protesters and climate activists with harsh prison sentences and hefty fines.
 For example, the Safe and Secure Transportation of American Energy act would make it a federal felony punishable by 20 years in prison to “disrupt” planned or operational gas pipelines – without defining what constitutes "disruption," meaning it even could be applied to a lawsuit challenging a pipeline's permit. Similar bills based on model legislation crafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) already have been enacted in 22 states.
 
Social movements, the Guardian notes, usually generate attempts at repression. Repressive anti-protest laws proliferated in the wake of the 2016 Standing Rock protests. Protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd resulted in 52 such laws being introduced across 35 states. One federal bill then was the Unmasking Antifa Act, potentially criminalizing wearing a mask during a protest. This March, the virtually-identical Unmasking Hamas Act would make wearing a mask or other disguise while protesting in an “intimidating” or “oppressive” way punishable by 15 years in prison - while not defining either “oppressive” or “disguise.”
 
So understand: Protests about Gaza are not the cause; they are just the latest excuse. In the words of AJenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU,
“These state bills and Trump’s crackdown on protected political speech are intended to scare people away from protesting or, worse, criminalize the exercise of constitutional rights.” 
And there is Jay Saper, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, who said
“Make no mistake, this is not about Jewish safety. This is about advancing an authoritarian agenda to clamp down on dissent.”
That is the goal.
 
And not just the legislatures and the executive, the courts get used as well. The latest attacks on protest also include expanding civil penalties and expanding causes for individual action - a means of allowing repressive suits to be filed by individuals rather than government agencies. Such suits, which can tie up activists in expensive and bankrupting litigation for years, often take the form of a SLAPP* (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), used by the fossil fuel industry, wealthy individuals, and politicians to silence critics and suppress protest movements. For example,
[i]n Minnesota, a new bill seeks to create civil and criminal liability for funders and supporters of protesters who peacefully demonstrate on pipeline or other utility property. In Ohio, legislators are considering whether participants of noisy or disruptive but non-violent protests – as well as people and organizations who support them – could face expensive lawsuits.`

Three other states – Alaska, Wisconsin, Illinois – are considering new or harsher civil penalties for protesters.
The good news here is that most of these bills fail to pass or never make it out of committee in the first place. The bad news is that any of them at all pass, especially when any one of them applied with hostile intent - which is the point of them - can do significant damage to our right to protest.
On Monday[, April 7,] in Washington DC, a non-violent climate protester was convicted on felony charges of conspiracy against the United States and property damage for putting washable finger paint on the protective case of the Little Dancer statue in the National Gallery. Timothy Martin, who faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count, will be sentenced in August.
Years in prison and a bankrupting fine for "conspiracy" and "damage" that wasn't even to the statue and could be cleared up with a wet cloth. Intimidation into utter silence. That what all this is about.

And don't you ever forget it.
 
*From April 5, 2013: A SLAPP is a lawsuit is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their opposition. That is, the suers don't really expect to win the suit. What they want to do is to drain their opponents either financially, emotionally, or better yet both, so the opponents are exhausted and just give up.

They were popular among corporations from the 70s to the 90s, particularly when they were leveled against individuals or "kitchen table" groups that were using regulatory proceedings and hearings to oppose some plan of some corporation. The price for dropping such suits - which were patently frivolous, as they often claimed that by criticizing the company's proposal you were by definition "defaming it" and "causing it to suffer financial loss" - the price for dropping the suits was usually dropping out of the regulatory process and letting the company's proposal proceed unopposed. These suits lost a lot of their luster when their targets who were in a position to fight them began to file what became known as SLAPP-backs, where the roles were switched and the corporation went from plaintiff to defendant.
 
For more on SLAPP-backs, go here

Remember when...

 
...privacy from government snooping was a significant issue? Maybe I mean definitely it should be again. Two recent stories tell us why.
 
In the first, 404 Media reported on May 29 that earlier that month, a Texas cop, suspecting that a woman had gotten a self-administered abortion, performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to try to find her. The search included states where abortion is legal such as Washington and Illinois. 
 
A company called Flock markets the cameras, usually marketed to cities and towns to address concerns about local crime or find missing people. Instead, it has become another means for police to conduct sweeping, warrantless surveillance, enabling police in one state to "investigate what is a human right in another state because it is a crime in another," in the words of Kate Bertash of the Digital Defense Fund.
 
(Sidebar: I first wrote about ALPRs in 2007 when New York City was about to install its first of them.)
 
The second comes from The Intercept, which reported on May 22 that US intelligence agencies are evading the 4th Amendment and obtaining vast amounts of personal and sensitive information that normally would require a search warrant to obtain.
 
How? Simply by buying it from data brokers, a vast and growing - and largely unregulated - market.
 
But there's a problem: There's too much data for sale from too many sources and oh dear, the spooks can't use it efficiently. So, the article informs us,
[t]he Office of the Director of National Intelligence is working on a system to centralize and “streamline” the use of commercially available information.... The data portal will include information deemed by the ODNI as highly sensitive, that which can be “misused to cause substantial harm, embarrassment, and inconvenience to U.S. persons.”

That data will be available to the 18 separate agencies and offices that comprise the federal intelligence "community" - and perhaps others beyond those. It will also enable use of unreliable, hallucination-prone AI large-language models and pseudoscientific “sentiment analysis,” which claims being able to know someone’s opinion about a topic by analyzing implicit signals in their behavior, movement, or speech.

But don't worry, really - the spooks insist this is just about efficiency and is not any threat to First or Fourth Amendment rights. Really. They mean it this time. They do. Because efficiency in government spying on us is all about freedom.
 
Footnote: The program to establish this "Data Consortium" was started during the Biden administration.

Good News: death with dignity bill advances

 
Okay, here we have some good news by way of Hemant Mehta, aka Friendly Atheist.
 
After more than a decade of work, a recently retired openly humanist member of the Delaware State House got to see his important “death with dignity” bill become law
 
This was the end of a 10-year effort by the now-retired “Unitarian Universalist humanist" Paul Baumbach. It was actually passed last session only to be vetoed by Gov. John Carney. This year, with a new governor, Matt Meyer, it passed again and was signed into law.
 
 The new law is crammed with safeguards so that this choice is available only to terminally-ill patients who are acting of their own free will and are fully aware of what they are doing. As Mehta puts it:
This was meant to be a last resort for patients with no other options available to them, not a first resort for the desperate. It’s the humane approach for people whose only path forward involves unimaginable suffering.
Delaware becomes the tenth state with such an end-of-life law even though a recent Gallup poll showed 66-71% of Americans support allowing physician-assisted suicide. The percentage variance came from how the question was phrased, with the higher percentage resulting from including the word "painless."
 
And in fact, there's more good news on the same front. On May 27, the French National Assembly approved a bill to legalize assisted dying. The bill, which has the support of President Emmanuel Macron, is expected to pass the Senate, with polls saying 90% of the public supports such laws.
 
France will join several other European countries along with Canada and Australia in having a right-to-die law.
 
I know this issue can be divisive but I have had the experience of watching someone grievously ill whose life had shrunk to just surviving suffering and who openly expressed a request to "pull the plug" have to continue to suffer to the end because this option was not available. Neither the patient nor those who care about them should have to go through that.

Tuesday, June 03, 2025

And another thing: quick evolution

 
"And another thing" was the title I always gave to science-y stuff that I found interesting. So why not start with one of those. Consider it a way of easing back in to heavier stuff.
 
So this comes from Smithsonian magazine, which brings news of evolution occurring in real time - in this case, about ten generations.
 
The study involved was published in the May 21 edition of Global Change Biology and related to Anna's hummingbirds (Calypte anna), a species found in California.
 
Simply (probably oversimply, so read the article) put, the proliferation of hummingbird feeders since World War II has provided the birds with a plentiful supply of nectar, resulting in longer, larger, beaks - the better to take advantage of the feeders - as well as enabling them to expand their range from southern California up the coast to British Columbia.
 
So take that, creationists: Yeah, evolution can take tens or hundreds of thousands of years, but it doesn't have to. The argument "no one has seen evolution" just won't wash. Not that it ever did.

A quick note

To move myself back into posting more regularly, I've decided to try to make it a practice to once a week to post a few items related to some things that over the previous several days struck me and which seemed not to generate a lot of response. Wish me luck.

By the way, in all cases you are encouraged to check out the original article.

Thursday, April 03, 2025

The "state secrets" privilege is a lie

Okay, you probably know the story: President Trumpsk invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to summarily deport hundreds of Venezuelan citizens without any due process or opportunity for appeal, based solely on a claim that they are members of a criminal gang, a claim not only unsubstantiated but one which the Trumpsk gang asserted they don't have to.

(I used to call our soi-disant king "Tweetie-pie" because he loved Tweets and he's a bird-brain, but in honor of the co-presidency of the Trump-Musk White House, "Trumpsk" seemed appropriate.)

That lead to a series of go-arounds with Judge Jeb Boasberg, who issued an order temporarily halting the deportations and was trying to find just how and why Trumpsk and company defied it, leading to their invoking the so-called "state secrets" privilege with the intent of shutting Boasberg down entirely.

You know all that. Here are two things you many not know, or at least have not been made clear by the establishment media:

- The Alien Enemies Act does not apply here and the claim that it does is entirely bogus.

- The "state secrets" privilege is built on lies.

For the first, just look at the actual law, not the truncated versions seen in the media. It was passed as An Act Respecting Alien Enemies as the third of the four notorious Alien and Sedition Acts, which cracked down on "foreigners" and tried to stifle criticism of the government - less than seven years after the adoption of the First Amendment. This now may be our most dangerous encounter with repression, but it is certainly not our first.

Anyway, this is the first paragraph of the law, with needed emphasis added:
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government, and the President of the United States shall make public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies.
Note first that for the law to apply by any stretch, the Trumpsk cabal must, repeat must, be claiming that Venezuela - not some gang, but the government of Venezuela - is responsible for this "invasion." That is, they must be arguing that Venezuela has declared war on the United States. (Some bold reporter who isn't afraid of losing that sweet, sweet, access should ask about that.)

What's more, Section 2 of the law1 says it is the duty of "the several courts of the United States, and of each state" - not the president or any agent of the Executive Branch - to "after a full examination and hearing ... and sufficient cause therefor appearing, shall and may order such alien or aliens to be removed out of the territory of the United States."

In other words, due process! Hey, Trumpsk, heard of it?

Apparently, some had because it seems that in the past, administrations have been literate enough so that the law had been invoked only during wartime; specifically, the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II. In the latter case it served as the justification of the internment of Japanese-American civilians during World War II, and we all know how proud we are of that now. If we survive as a (relatively, at least) free people, I believe this episode will come to be seen the same way - and because it resulted not in internment but included sending victims to an infamous Salvadoran prison notable for its cruel conditions and torture, it will likely be seen as worse.

Moving on, the "state secrets" privilege, for its part, has quite the ignoble history.

It's the legal principle that enables the government to seek to shut down suits challenging government actions on the grounds that pursuing the claim would require the release of information that would harm national security.

It's important to note at the top that the words "privilege" and "principle" matter as they make clear that courts are not required to accept the government's assertion - even as they, unhappily, are usually "very deferential" to the executive branch on such claims of privilege, even when the government has refused to back up its claim, as was usually the case.

But on to the history and why the whole thing is a lie.

It came to the US in the early years as part of English common law, but it wasn't formalized until 1953 in the case US v. Reynolds. The salient facts of that case are these:

In October 1948, a B-29 Superfortress bomber crashed while on a secret test flight related to weapons development. Nine were killed, including three civilian engineers.

The three widows of the civilians sued for compensation, claiming the government had been negligent. They wanted access to witness statements and accident reports prepared by government investigators.

The government initially resisted, weirdly claiming that turning over the reports would damage future safety investigations because, lacking a guarantee of confidentiality, witnesses and investigators would pull their punches.

After it became clear that strategy was a loser, the DOJ lawyers defending the government switched arguments and said both that the reports contained national security secrets so important that if they were revealed it would endanger national defense and that the decision to invoke the state secrets privilege was not judicable - that is, could not be reviewed by the courts.

Lower courts rejected the executive branch’s claim of unreviewable power, giving the executive branch a choice of turning over the documents to the trial judge for a private assessment or default on the widows’ lawsuit and pay up.

But remember, this is 1953, when we were waist-deep in the Red Scare aka the McCarthy Era. The Supreme Court was unwilling to take up the burden of questioning cries of "National Defense!"

So on March 9, 1953, the Supreme Court by a 6-3 majority found that the government had made a valid claim of privilege against revealing military secrets, a privilege "well established in the law of evidence" - which it decidedly was not. It was established in common law, but until this ruling it had not been codified into practice.

Beyond that, the majority opinion said that in some circumstances, trial judges should simply accept the executive branch’s privilege without conducting their own private examination of the documents at issue to test the plausibility of the claim. In other words, it's government by "trust me, bro."

Such trust was undeserved. When the documents the widows sought in Reynolds were finally declassified in 1996, it turned out that the government case was a complete, thoroughgoing lie. Top to bottom, stem to stern, choose your preferred cliche.

There was nothing secret in the accident reports. Zip, zilch, nada. Neither the secret guided missile equipment being tested nor anything else secret on board figured in the crash in any way. Neither that equipment nor anything else secret was even mentioned in the reports.

Rather, they showed that the plane had had problems before, added to already-public information that B-29 engines had a tendency to catch fire, revealed that heat shields had not been installed despite the existence of a work order for the retrofit, the plane was not properly checked out before the flight, and the flight crew may have not responded properly when an engine fire did break out.

In short, to cover up its own negligence and incompetence leading to the unnecessary deaths of nine people, the government lied through its legal teeth - and continued to lie, shielded by a wall of "it's classified," for 43 years.

Say it again: The whole structure of the "state secrets" privilege is built on lies.

In the years since, the privilege has enabled federal agencies to conceal conduct, withhold documents, and block troublesome civil litigation, including suits by whistle-blowers and possible victims of discrimination.

The Shrub gang (i.e., Bush II, George W. Bush for the younger folks among us) invoked the privilege to a degree that brought it enough public attention that in 2008 it was one of the things candidate Barack Obama pledged to "change."

When it came, that change looked to be a step forward in that it centralized the authority to invoke the privilege and somewhat tightened the standard required from "harm" to national security to "significant harm" and that it couldn't be used to hide violations of law, bureaucratic foul-ups, or mere embarrassment.

Which was to the good, but remember this was policy, not law and so could be changed at any time and in fact was done to head off binding legislation. It did not stop its use by the Obama White House, which continued to assert the broadest and most radical version of the privilege. Indeed, literally just hours after the new policy was announced, the DOJ was in court invoking the claim and six weeks later, in November 2009, it did it again - in both cases looking to squelch a suit involving illegal domestic spying. And so much for not using it to hide crimes.

And now here we are again, this time with a would-be tyrant who wants to expand the reach of the "state secrets" privilege - maybe better described as an Executive Branch "Get out of jail free" card - beyond getting suits dismissed to being free to ignore court orders.

Because of lies.

As a final thought, in his book on the case2, reporter Barry Siegel called the Reynolds decision “an act of faith.” It was indeed, a faith that lies at the heart of our democracy and our republican form of government: the faith that, despite whatever dissensions and disagreements there may be, even if extreme, ultimately everyone agrees to play by pretty much the same rules. It has long been a question among philosophers of government what would happen if someone in a position of power just ignored the rules and simply declared "I'll do what I please. Try and stop me."

That is exactly the question we are facing now, drawn from, at least to some degree, a legacy of misplaced faith from 72 years ago.

So Judge Boasberg should take a deep breath, remind himself that he is under no legal obligation to accept the Trumpsk claim of privilege, deny it, say "prove it to me," and ready himself to issue contempt citations when they refuse, which they will. "No, you won't do as you please. I will do my part to stop you."

Footnote: In his statement supporting the Trumpsk position in the case before Boasberg, Robert Cerna, an enforcement officer with the Department for the Protection of the Fatherland, claimed the government has lots and lots of evidence that those deported were criminals - but of course offered none.

All of which may even be true, but it's irrelevant to the issue at hand of defying court's order. But to get to the point here:
"While it is true that many of the TdA [Tren de Aragua] members removed under the AEA do not have criminal records in the United States, that is because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time. The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile."
That is, the government position is that the very lack of information saying they are gang members is proof that they are guilty.

References to 1984 seem rather trite now, but it damn well sounds like Cerna has mastered doublethink.

1The full text of Sec. 2: "And be it further enacted, That after any proclamation shall be made as aforesaid, it shall be the duty of the several courts of the United States, and of each state, having criminal jurisdiction, and of the several judges and justices of the courts of the United States, and they shall be, and are hereby respectively, authorized upon complaint, against any alien or alien enemies, as aforesaid, who shall be resident and at large within such jurisdiction or district, to the danger of the public peace or safety, and contrary to the tenor or intent of such proclamation, or other regulations which the President of the United States shall and may establish in the premises, to cause such alien or aliens to be duly apprehended and convened before such court, judge or justice; and after a full examination and hearing on such complaint, and sufficient cause therefor appearing, shall and may order such alien or aliens to be removed out of the territory of the United States, or to give sureties of their good behaviour, or to be otherwise restrained, conformably to the proclamation or regulations which shall and may be established as aforesaid, and may imprison, or otherwise secure such alien or aliens, until the order which shall and may be made, as aforesaid, shall be performed." (Emphasis of course added.)
2Claim of Privilege: A Mysterious Plane Crash, a Landmark Supreme Court Case, and the Rise of State Secrets by Barry Siegel (Harper, 2008). The LA Times article linked above is a review of the book.

Tuesday, March 11, 2025

A Tale of Two Trimmers

So, as reported by, among others, the estimable Erin Reed, California Governor Gavin Newsom spent much of the first episode of his new podcast sloppily agreeing with reactionary bigot and professional transmisiac1 Charlie Kirk. Newsom said he "completely aligns" with Kirk in opposing trans women in sports, calling the idea “deeply unfair,” labeled denying gender-affirming surgery to prisoners an easy "90/10" call, accepted a description of gender-affirming care as "butchery" and "chemical castration" to which "we have to be more sensitized," and endorsed a ban on such care for youth.
As a result of which, someone Politico identified only as "a Democratic strategist from a swing state" said Newsom had created "a permission structure for other Democrats to do this, too" - that is, to trash trans rights (plus other "far left" policies) in pursuit of that forever just beyond our reach mass of almost mythical "moderate" Republicans.

Among the comments and responses at Reed's site, there was a lot of questioning of why Newsom would do this, with some saying he was preparing a 2028 run for president (he is term limited and will be out of office as governor in 2026) with others saying this very act will kill his chances for that. But through it all was the throbbing pulse of emotional pain driven be a combination of genuine anger and deep betrayal.

For my part, truth is that I can't say I'm truly shocked by this. (I bet Kirk was a lot more surprised than I was.) Gavin Newsom always kinda creeped me out. He was - I can't put my finger on it, but he was somehow TOO polished, TOO smooth, TOO aware of how he looked, spoke, and moved. Okay, truth is he always seemed to me to be as slick as his hair and every bit as carefully created.

Still, he had built a certain reputation and to see him so casually toss that aside to suck up to the bigoted extremist reactionary right (and for what?) is deeply, deeply saddening and profoundly disappointing. Not so much for the action - because again I'm not really shocked; I've seen too many such cowardly, self-interested betrayals over the years for that - but for the hope that preceded each such betrayal by the institutional Democratic Party; the hope, that is, that this time I was wrong.

Ultimately, Newsom is engaging in old-fashioned triangulation, the tactic of embracing, even actively avowing, some of your opponents' programs or attitudes, intending to insulate yourself against being attacked on those grounds. Bill Clinton made the concept famous. Barack Obama was a master at it. And yes it can be effective, as Clinton and Obama proved - provided, that is, you don't give a damn about the impact on the people affected. Which we now have to assume Newsom doesn't.

On the other coast we can see a different, if you will a "kinder, gentler" version of the same sort of "give 'em an inch and they won't take a mile, we promise" thinking, this time from Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton. Stung by the reaction to his comments that he didn't want his daughter getting "run over" by a trans girl on the sports field, Moulton doubled down in a letter sent by an aide to a constituent (quoted in full in the comments to Reed's piece about Newsom).

Moulton’s view, according to the aide, is that "Republicans are using trans people in sports as a means to fearmonger about the trans population at large and get more people on board with their wholly anti-trans agenda."

Okay so far.

"[B]y divorcing sports from the broader issue of fundamental rights ... we can do a better job fighting back. [A] middle ground on sports ... can peel a large chunk of average Americans away from the extremism of the right."

Stop right there. This is utter bullshit. What Moulton actually said in the wake of the 2024 election was “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” [Emphasis added for clarity.] 2[

There isn't a single goddam word in there about finding this so-called "middle ground." It is all about being "brutally honest" and not being "afraid" to throw trans children under the bus, using the excuse of the election loss to do it.

Later, he blamed criticism of him on "cancel culture" and whined about supposed "shouting from the extreme left corners of social media" and "purity tests."

So no, I don't buy the crap. Rather, I'd say this could be called Moulton's "Sister Souljah moment," a sort of mirror version of triangulation, where rather than embracing the opponent's view, a politician deliberately attacks some person or position that could be associated with their own campaign, a way pf going "Oh no no no, I'm not with them! It got the name when Bill Clinton attacked hip-hop performer/activist Sister Souljah as a way of rejecting Jesse Jackson and proving he wasn't "too pro-black." Later, Barack Obama used it to assert his own patriotism by going out of his way to impugn the patriotism of the movements and activists of the '60s. Here, Moulton declares his self-congratulatory supposed brave independence from those Democrats who apparently prefer seeing "little girls" get "run over" to being "honest."

But you know what, forget all that for now. Leave it aside. Take him at his word. He just wants to "peel away average Americans" from the extremist right and if only - oh if only - we just give them this one point, if we just say "Okay, you're right about that one," if we just say that "the dreams and aspirations" of girls and women in sports must be protected against "unfairness" - or, more exactly, those of cis girls and women must be protected, while the dreams and aspirations of trans girls and women, despite them being every bit as strong and representing every bit as much commitment, are to be, what, martyrs to the cause? Too unimportant for our attention? Whatever, if we would just sacrifice those hopes and aspirations, everything else will be so much better.

Okay, so if it's not bullshit, it's - stupid.

And I mean stooopid.

It's stupid because it won't work. I don't know if it ever has. When has giving into a bully ever satisfied them? The paranoia about trans folks was manufactured almost out of thin air by preying on fears about social change in general and sex in particular. What in hell makes a trimmer like Moulton think that if we surrender on sports they won't just switch back to restrooms? Or go even more in on "obscene" books? Or "trafficking?" Or whatever other "OMG! Save the children!" rant seems useful at the moment, regardless of truth? What have the fanatics ever needed truth or even logic to push their paranoia and when has the right-wing noise machine ever failed to turn that message, that focus, up to 11?3

That's particularly true because, as Reed noted in a different post, sports was never the real issue any more than bathrooms were the real issue when that was the first line of attack back in 2016.

Rather, each of them was a wedge issue, the thing the reactionaries thought they could get people upset about, creeped about, emotional about; they were a way in, a way to render and define trans people somehow as different, as other, as "not us" - and so to make anti-trans laws acceptable, even proper, even necessary.

Which is exactly how it has worked. Virtually every - if not every single - state that has passed a sports ban on the grounds of "fairness" and "protecting women in sports," often with support from the other side in pursuit of "compromise," has followed up with additional bills targeting everything from restrooms, to IDs, to stripping away civil rights protections, to entirely removing trans folks from existence in law, right up to one proposed Texas that would make someone telling their employer or a "governmental agency" (which could include police) that they are anything other than "the biological sex assigned at birth" a case of fraud - that is, telling such people you are trans would be a felony. Admitting you exist would be a crime.

Now, not every one of those proposed laws passed; the one in Texas all but certainly won't (it has no co-sponsors and no hearing scheduled), the caveat "all but" being distressingly necessary these days. And not all will survive legal challenges. But the point is, the bogus claims to "protect women's sports" was the proverbial nose of the camel4 that has resulted in damage to and even devastation of the lives of trans folks in 25 states.

Indeed, some among the fanatics will even openly admit it. For example, Reed points to Terry Schilling of the reactionary American Principles Project, who has defined extremism as "loving America," describing "the sports issue" as just the "beginning point," one chosen because among people who never accepted losing on same-sex marriage and had had wet dreams of overturning Roe v. Wade it provided a way to attack trans rights as a first step toward undoing all the changes they find so icky. And note I use the work "icky" deliberately because none of this opposition to basic rights is based on rational consideration of reality. It is all id and super-ego combining while skipping over ego5; it's reptilian brain and culturally-conditioned repression and shame about sex overruling rational judgment.

Which means, again, that despite their protestations, Newsom and Moulton and the others eager to follow their lead (such as that "Democratic strategist from a swing state") are not "engaging with the opposition," they are effectively confirming that the doubts and fears the reactionaries try to raise about transgender folks are legitimate questions. They are not in search of "middle ground," they are rationalizing their political cowardice while cowering against the threat that the GOPpers might call them a name. They are not "stripping people away from the right" or setting up for a better resistance to the reactionaries, they are declaring that when the pressure mounts, they will crack, preferring accommodation and slow-motion surrender to taking the risks involving in striving to win.6

The rebuttal to all the trimmers and their enablers was presented 165 years ago. It came in a speech by Abraham Lincoln at Cooper Union in New York City on February 27, 18607. Lincoln's target was the demand of legislators from the South that slavery be allowed in federal territories and it's wise counsel for those like to imagine that if we just concede, y'know, just this one little point to the fanatics, they'll be more reasonable about the rest.

Consider these excerpts, with emphasis as in the original and comments for context in brackets:
Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us [over slavery], let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them.

Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections [such as Harper's Ferry] are the rage now. Will it satisfy them, if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know, because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone [to practice slavery], but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task.

What will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas' new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

Let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored - contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man.

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.
And the hell with the trimmers.

As a final note, I'm also reminded by all of this of writing to then-President Bill Clinton around 1997 to saying that he had been foolish in dealing with the GOPpers. I wrote, as best as memory allows so the exact words may be off but the point is accurately repeated, that "Every time you have offered some compromise looking for some equivalent response, it has instead been 'That's nice. Now what else will you give us?' You've got to stop thinking you're dealing with reasonable people," adding that "Whatever value strategic retreat has in military campaigns, in politics you never win by backing up."

Thirty years down the road and it's the same-old-same-old.

Which leads, in a way to a bottom line. The same old bottom line: It's up to us. We can't rely on our "leaders" and we can't rely on electoral politics, certainly not on its own. We have to go beyond, act outside of and beyond, electoral politics. We have to be in public; in the streets, even filling the streets; in the jails, even filling the jails. We have to be loud, noisy, disruptive, but most of all creative; we have to be impolite, rude, to power; and we have to not care what they call us - because they will call us all sorts of things - and keep on going anyway. It’s not a matter of, if I can oversimplify the terms, “protest or politics” (i.e., street protest or electoral politics), it’s a matter of protest informing politics.

Because, as this whole mess should have shown us yet again, political action and change does not come as the result of having "good people" in office; rather, having those "good people" in office comes as the result of political action and change.

Carry it on.

1I saw someone - I can't remember who, so unfortunately I can't give credit - who used the term "transmisiac," which I have adopted. The suffix "phobia" refers to fear; the suffix "misia" refers to hatred. Bigots like Kirk don't fear transgender folks, they hate them. They should be called the haters that they are.

2D'ja ever notice that in all the concern about sports, the subject of trans boys never comes up? That's gotta be because everybody just knows that "a female or formerly female athlete" could never really compete in sports against a real boy, amirite?

3Yes, that is a "This Is Spinal Tap" reference.

4If you don't know the story, see here. Notable here is that a 1915 telling of the fable has as a moral "It is a wise rule to resist the beginnings of evil."

5Yes, Freudian psychology is old stuff and pretty much dismissed now. But the image is still useful to describe fears and phobias overriding objective reality.

6Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has said a key ingredient in political victory is "the willingness to lose well," being ready to fight, lose, pick yourself up, and fight again.

7The full speech can be found
here. For context, the Republican Party accepted slavery in the states where it already existed but opposed its expansion to the territories. Slave-holding states wanted to allow expansion, fearing that otherwise, as those territories later joined the nation as free states, the power and influence of slave states would keep shrinking until the power to maintain slavery against possible Constitutional amendments disappeared.

 
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