A new, more dangerous front has opened in the voting wars, and it’s going to be much harder to counteract than the now-familiar fight over voting rules. At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count. The danger of manipulated election results looms.
We already know the contours of the battle over voter suppression. The public has been inundated with stories about Georgia’s new voting law, from Major League Baseball’s decision to pull the All-Star Game from Atlanta, to criticism of new restrictions that prevent giving water to people waiting in long lines to vote. With lawsuits already filed against restrictive aspects of that law and with American companies and elite law firms lined up against Republican state efforts to make it harder to register and vote, there’s at least a fighting chance that the worst of these measures will be defeated or weakened.
The new threat of election subversion is even more concerning. These efforts target both personnel and policy; it is not clear if they are coordinated. They nonetheless represent a huge threat to American democracy itself.
Some of these efforts involve removing from power those who stood up to President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The Georgia law removes the secretary of state from decision-making power on the state election board. This seems aimed clearly at Georgia’s current Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, punishing him for rejecting Mr. Trump’s entreaties to “find” 11,780 votes to flip Joe Biden’s lead in the state.
But the changes will apply to Mr. Raffensperger’s successor, too, giving the legislature a greater hand in who counts votes and how they are counted. Michigan’s Republican Party refused to renominate Aaron Van Langevelde to the state’s canvassing board. Mr. Van Langevelde voted with Democrats to accept Michigan’s Electoral College vote for Mr. Biden as legitimate. He was replaced by Tony Daunt, the executive director of a conservative Michigan foundation that is financially backed by the DeVos family.
Even those who have not been stripped of power have been censured by Republican Party organizations, including not just Mr. Raffensperger and Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, but also Barbara Cegavske, the Republican secretary of state of Nevada who ran a fair election and rejected spurious arguments that the election was stolen. The message that these actions send to politicians is that if you want a future in state Republican politics, you had better be willing to manipulate election results or lie about election fraud.
Republican state legislatures have also passed or are considering laws aimed at stripping Democratic counties of the power to run fair elections. The new Georgia law gives the legislature the power to handpick an election official who could vote on the state election board for a temporary takeover of up to four county election boards during the crucial period of administering an election and counting votes. That provision appears to be aimed at Democratic counties like Fulton County that have increased voter access. A new Iowa law threatens criminal penalties against local election officials who enact emergency election rules and bars them from sending voters unsolicited absentee ballot applications. …
the International Energy Agency says global energy demand will rebound by 4.6% this year, led by a 4.5% jump in coal burning..so someone better go out and buy some carbon offsets quick so it doesn’t affect the climate..
I think Kevin Drum is right here. Meanwhile, stop wasting our mental and fiscal resources playing around on Mars, which has the impact of a College Road Trip for smart people. “Geoengineering is our future. I am not in favor of geoengineering. Nobody with a room temperature IQ is in favor of geoengineering. Nevertheless, the world has shown no willingness to take the collective action needed to address climate change, and it’s unlikely that a fabulous new invention will do the job either. Around 2040 or so this will become obvious and the only alternative will be some sort of geoengineering. So we’ll do it. This means that we should be studying every possible form of geoengineering now so that if we end up doing it, at least we have some idea of what we’re getting ourselves into.”https://jabberwocking.com/
… a giant, space-based sunshade. We’re already modifying our climate by accident, so why not do it by deliberate geoengineering?It’s a radical idea, and it just might just work. Reducing the amount of light reaching our planet could cool the Earth quickly, even with rising carbon dioxide levels. While the asteroid which helped wipe out the dinosaurs blocked out 90% of the Sun’s rays, we would need to divert just 2-4%, it’s believed, to take the Earth back to its pre-industrial climate.Space sunshades have support in high places, from the Royal Society to Nasa, to the European Union. It’s even roused the interest of the most respected authority on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The concept may be increasingly mainstream, but how we’d do it sounds more far-fetched. To uniformly cool the planet in a system that’s always on the move, the shade would be installed in an area of outer space that’s balanced between the gravity of the Earth and the Sun – the L1 point – about a million miles away. …How a giant space umbrella could stop global warming
Around the world, auto assembly lines are going quiet, workers are idle and dealership parking lots are looking bare.A shortage of semiconductors, the tiny but critical chips used to calibrate cars’ fuel injection, run infotainment systems or provide the brains for cruise control, has upended automaking. …One big reason automakers can’t find enough chips is that semiconductor manufacturers have given priority to manufacturers of smartphones, video game consoles and other consumer electronics, which tend to be more lucrative customers. … https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/business/auto-semiconductors-general-motors-mercedes.html?smid=tw-share
A Tiny Part’s Big Ripple: Global Chip Shortage Hobbles the Auto IndustryAlmost every carmaker has had to curtail production, hampering the economic recovery.
Former President Donald Trump is headed north for the summer, and will move temporarily to his resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, according to a new report. Trump has spent the first few months of his post-presidency life at Mar-a-Lago, the beachside club in Palm Beach, Fla., that the New York real estate mogul has owned since 1985. But sources close to the former president told Business Insider that Trump is relocating temporarily and plans to use the move to jumpstart fundraising efforts for his 2024 campaign effort — not exactly an unexpected move for those in Trump’s orbit. Mar-a-Lago traditionally closes for the season after Memorial Day, when the moneyed membership disperses to escape the state’s cloying summer heat — the club’s peak season usually lasts from Thanksgiving to Easter …
EMichael You appear to be hoping our collective IQ will go up with the room temperature. It’s not enough we have polluted our planet to the point of death, you want to let the quack doctors finish the job in the grand manner. We won’t even raise our gas tax to save our planet. That tells you what we are as a species. Superstitious ignoramuses who believe a fairy will come to save us at no cost to ourselves. Sure, we can stop drinking any time we want. Tomorrow for sure. [not all superstition is about “god.” We have “Science,”]
CEO Pay Remains Stratospheric, Even at Companies Battered by Pandemic While millions of people struggled to make ends meet, many of the companies hit hardest in 2020 showered their executives with riches.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/business/ceos-pandemic-compensation.html?smid=tw-share… The coronavirus plunged the world into an economic crisis, sent the U.S. unemployment rate skyrocketing and left millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet. Yet at many of the companies hit hardest by the pandemic, the executives in charge were showered with riches. …The divergent fortunes of C.E.O.s and everyday workers illustrate the sharp divides in a nation on the precipice of an economic boom but still racked by steep income inequality. The stock markets are up and the wealthy are spending freely, but millions are still facing significant hardship. Executives are minting fortunes while laid-off workers line up at food banks.“Many of these C.E.O.s have improved profitability by laying off workers,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, who has proposed new taxes on the ultrawealthy. “A tiny handful of people who have shimmied all the way to the top of the greasy pole get all of the rewards, while everyone else gets left behind.” …
How to help friends avoid conspiracy theories https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/22/opinion/how-help-friends-avoid-conspiracy-theories/?event=event25 via @BostonGlobe – April 22Conspiracy theories are an insidious form of conceptual quicksand. A person who has sunk deep into the quagmire is often unable to extricate himself, and if a concerned bystander tries to toss a lifeline of rationality, a conspiratorialist is likely to cast it suspiciously aside.Although conspiracy-theory susceptibility currently runs most strongly on the right, that wasn’t always so. The wellspring of modern conspiratorialism, the belief that the assassination of President Kennedy was the work of the mafia or the CIA or another cabal, once animated port-side precincts. So, too, did the notion that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were an inside job.False beliefs fade only slowly. Further, the experts I’ve consulted say there’s little one can do to disabuse a hardcore adherent of a fallacious but favored narrative.In part, that’s because conspiracy theories are based on non-falsifiable propositions, assertions that don’t exist in concrete enough form to be tested or disproved. In part, it’s because a conspiratorialist belief is sometimes a central pillar in a larger ideological edifice. If one believes, contra the evidence, that the November election was somehow stolen from Donald Trump, that person might also number among the one-quarter to one-third of Trump voters who approve of the storming of the Capitol or at least empathize with the ransacking mob. That renders it doubly difficult to abandon the premise of a purloined election, since doing so also requires recognizing Jan. 6 as a violent, unjustified assault on our democracy.In such a situation, facts don’t render one skeptical of conspiracy theories; rather, conspiracy theories make one skeptical of facts.But one expert on the matter, Jovan Byford, author of the indispensable “Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction” and a senior lecturer in psychology at Britain’s Open University, thinks it’s possible to help people who are only ankle-deep in conspiratorialist thinking, those who “might not treat conspiracy theories as the literal truth but are willing to consider that they might be ‘onto something,’ even if in a purely metaphorical way.”The best approach isn’t necessarily to attack your friend or family member’s favored conspiracy theory head-on, but rather to make a broader observation about the demonstrated falseness of conspiracy theories over time, he said.“One may want to point out that throughout history, conspiracy theories have come up short,” Byford recommended via e-mail. By doing so, one “just might encourage the person to direct their curiosity and skepticism to conspiracy theories themselves.”For example, Byford said, “When talking to a COVID denialist or an anti-vaxxer, one might point out that the longstanding claims by AIDS denialists that antiretroviral drugs are more harmful than HIV were not only disproved, but that they [those false claims] also contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths in sub-Saharan Africa.”Or take QAnon, the belief that Trump is covertly and heroically battling an elite global cabal of cannibalistic Satan-worshipping pedophiles who control both media and government.With people inclined toward QAnon, Byford said, it’s worth explaining “the longer history of conspiracy theories, where tales of child abuse, ritual sacrifices, moral depravity, and so on have always been a regular ingredient and a way of weaving a narrative of a battle between good and evil, where the latter is always presented as violating all moral and sexual taboos.”Further, he said, one should note that though many conspiracy theories predict an imminent showdown between good and evil, that moment of truth never actually arrives.QAnon is ripe for such a critique. That hydra-headed fantasy said Trump would cruise to reelection. It then maintained that Trump’s various legal challenges would prevail and he would be inaugurated on Jan. 20. The belief next became that Trump would resume office on the pre-22nd Amendment inauguration date of March 4. And all that is to say nothing of the multiple arrests of cabal members that were supposed to occur. Further, we now have a good clue about who has been duping the faithful by posing as Q, a supposedly anonymous operative working to expose the evil cabal: Ron Watkins, the former operator of 8kun, where Q posts.Don’t expect immediate success, but don’t give up. No, we can’t drain the entire conspiratorialist swamp, but we might be able to rescue some friends and family members before they sink too deeply in the morass.
Young millennials and members of Gen Z are strongly supportive of President Biden, hopeful about the state of the country, and far more likely to be politically engaged than their predecessors, according to anew youth pollconducted by the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. They are also facing serious mental health challenges: more than a quarter said they have had thoughts that they would be better off dead or of hurting themselves in the past two weeks.The national poll of 2,500 18-to-29 year olds conducted between March 9 and March 22 surveyed young people at a historic moment, after a year of pandemic-induced lockdown and a few months after the inauguration of a new president. …
Earlier this week, Florida Republicans enacted a law they claimed would prevent riots in the state. Its real purpose, of course, was to discourage protesting and punish demonstrators. One of the bill’s provisions has received a fair amount of national attention, as it seems to give Floridians permission to attack protesters with their cars. The bill doesn’t exactly make it legal to run someone over, but it does shield drivers from civil liability if they injure or kill protesters on Florida roads.In isolation, it’s hard to understand the purpose of such a curious provision. What problem does it solve? As the Florida American Civil Liberties Union pointed out, very few recent protests in the state involved violence or even vandalism, and police and prosecutors were already well equipped (some would say, more than well equipped) to handle whatever rioting might occur. If demonstrators blocking roads and snarling up traffic were a serious problem in Florida in need of a legislative remedy, surely thoughtful legislators could come up with a more effective or ethical response than making it less personally risky for people to injure or kill those demonstrators with cars. But efficacy and ethics don’t really seem to be guiding the decisions of Republican-run state legislatures lately.To understand what’s really behind the bill, recall that it comesless than four years after a 20-year-old neo-Nazi named James Alex Fields Jr. deliberately drove a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of people counterprotesting the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fields injured scores of people and killed a woman named Heather Heyer. The obvious and immediate response to this intentional attack was nearly universal shock and horror. Fields was charged with murder and convicted. But since just before that attack, and even more so after it, Republican elected officials across the country have been trying to make it easier for certain people to run over certain other people.Ari Weil, a researcher at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, counted six states that considered laws shielding drivers who attack protesters in 2017, but most of those “hit and kill” bills (as the ACLU refers to them) went nowhere. It took a few more years for the right-wing propaganda apparatus to fully numb conservative consciences, and prepare them to openly endorse an idea as plainly depraved as this one. In the meantime, the car attacks kept coming: In 2020, Weil tracked “72 incidents of cars driving into protesters across 52 different cities,” over the span of just over a month. The online far right memed about running over demonstrators regularly, and cops openly encouraged it in social media comments. Cops also, in cities such as New York and Detroit, participated in the practice themselves. In Boston last year, Police Sergeant Clifton McHale was recorded on a police body camera bragging about hitting demonstrators with a police cruiser. He was placed on administrative leave when that footage was surfaced by reporter Eoin Higgins. He is now, Higgins reports, back on desk duty.*Now lawmakers seem to have overcome whatever reticence they may once have felt about formally endorsing automobile attacks. Five states besides Florida introduced similar bills this year, granting some form of immunity to people running into demonstrators. The Iowa measure passed the state House and awaits Senate approval. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt just signed another version into law in his state. This one shields attacking drivers from criminal liability.The impetus for the Oklahoma bill, according to the Republican lawmaker who authored it, was an incident in which a pickup truck driver drove into a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Tulsa, paralyzing one person. The driver claimed to be scared and, notably, was not charged with a crime. That is to say that it was apparently already legal to drive into protesters in Oklahoma; these politicians merely helped clarify that fact.A few years ago, most people would have seen “politically motivated vehicle attacks” as a terrorist tactic pioneered by ISIS. Now American police regularly carry out these kinds of attacks, and Republican policymakers have officially endorsed the practice.There’s something very telling about how the car (or police cruiser, or truck, or SUV) has been enshrined into law as an instrument of state-sanctioned violence. American conservatives are creating, really, a sort of Second Amendment for cars. Not the Second Amendment in terms of the literal text in the Constitution, but the Second Amendment as existing doctrine. The legal framework conservative politicians and jurists spent years crafting and refining to facilitate politicized and racialized gun violence in this country is now expanding to another of America’s omnipresent and deadly institutions. …
‘Space-based sunshades’ – Here’s a start, albeit a modest one…The US Air Force wants to beam solar power to Earth from space https://www.space.com/space-based-solar-power-air-force-sspidr-project
Space-based solar power won’t be just a sci-fi dream forever, if things go according to the U.S. Air Force’s plans. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is developing a project called SSPIDR (“Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research”), which aims to mature the technology needed to harvest solar energy in space and beam it down for use on Earth. … The AFRL envisions sunlight-harvesting satellites equipped with innovative “sandwich tiles,” which will convert solar energy into radio frequency (RF) power and beam it to Earth. Down here, receiving antennas will transform that RF energy into usable power. …
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration, under increasing pressure to address a devastating surge of the coronavirus in India, said on Sunday that it had partially lifted a ban on the export of raw materials for vaccines and would also supply India with therapeutics, rapid diagnostic test kits, ventilators and personal protective gear.“Just as India sent assistance to the United States as our hospitals were strained early in the pandemic, the United States is determined to help India in its time of need,” Emily Horne, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said in a statement on Sunday.The announcement, an abrupt shift for the administration, came after Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, held a call earlier in the day with Ajit Doval, his counterpart in India, and as the Indian government reported more than 349,000 new infections, a world record for a single day. Ms. Horne said the United States had “identified sources of specific raw material urgently required for Indian manufacture of the Covishield vaccine,” the Indian-produced version of the AstraZeneca vaccine. …
With President Joe Biden approaching his 100th day in office this week, a slim majority of Americans approve of the job he’s doing, but he has been unable to overcome the country’s entrenched partisan divide, according to separate polls released Sunday.The surveys, from Fox News, NBC News and ABC News/The Washington Post, found that Biden is considerably more popular at the 100-day mark than his predecessor, Donald Trump, but his approval is well behind that of most other modern presidents at this point in their first terms.The ABC/Post poll found 52% of Americans approving of his performance and 42% disapproving. Comparing those numbers with past ABC/Post and Gallup surveys, he is less popular at 100 days than any other president since World War II except for Trump and Gerald Ford (who at this point had just issued a highly unpopular pardon to Richard Nixon).The NBC News poll put his approval at a similar level, 53% to 39%, and the Fox poll, which surveyed only registered voters, had it at 54% to 43%. … (NY Times)As Biden nears 100 days, polls show deep partisan divides – The Boston Globe In all three of the new polls, the president’s rating among Democrats was nearly unanimous — at least 9 in 10 approved of his performance. Among independents, he was just below 50% approval in the Fox and ABC/Post polls; the NBC poll had his approval with these unaffiliated voters at 61%. His support among Republicans was stuck around 1 in 10.
DobbsThe Right to Crash Cars into People. well, of course. if you are going to take away their guns what else can they do? Hah! Now let’s see you take away people’s cars! actually this is the sort of idea that would naturally occur to people in Florida. when i was there it was fun for pickup drivers to see how close they could come to bicycle riders. there were no painted shoulders on Florida roads at the time, so I suppose it was not actually illegal. In fact, at the first college I went to, some future Florida legislators didn’t like the way I was dressed, so they drove past me on my bicycle and one of them leaned out of the window of the car and hit me with a rolled up newspaper. now you’re going to call a newspaper a deadly weapon? as it happened i caught up with them at the next stop sign and pulled mr newspaperman out through the widow of the car. the result of this was that i got called into the dean’s office and yelled at.
Republicans Aren’t Done Messing With Elections
NY Times – April 23
A new, more dangerous front has opened in the voting wars, and it’s going to be much harder to counteract than the now-familiar fight over voting rules. At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count. The danger of manipulated election results looms.
We already know the contours of the battle over voter suppression. The public has been inundated with stories about Georgia’s new voting law, from Major League Baseball’s decision to pull the All-Star Game from Atlanta, to criticism of new restrictions that prevent giving water to people waiting in long lines to vote. With lawsuits already filed against restrictive aspects of that law and with American companies and elite law firms lined up against Republican state efforts to make it harder to register and vote, there’s at least a fighting chance that the worst of these measures will be defeated or weakened.
The new threat of election subversion is even more concerning. These efforts target both personnel and policy; it is not clear if they are coordinated. They nonetheless represent a huge threat to American democracy itself.
Some of these efforts involve removing from power those who stood up to President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The Georgia law removes the secretary of state from decision-making power on the state election board. This seems aimed clearly at Georgia’s current Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, punishing him for rejecting Mr. Trump’s entreaties to “find” 11,780 votes to flip Joe Biden’s lead in the state.
But the changes will apply to Mr. Raffensperger’s successor, too, giving the legislature a greater hand in who counts votes and how they are counted. Michigan’s Republican Party refused to renominate Aaron Van Langevelde to the state’s canvassing board. Mr. Van Langevelde voted with Democrats to accept Michigan’s Electoral College vote for Mr. Biden as legitimate. He was replaced by Tony Daunt, the executive director of a conservative Michigan foundation that is financially backed by the DeVos family.
Even those who have not been stripped of power have been censured by Republican Party organizations, including not just Mr. Raffensperger and Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, but also Barbara Cegavske, the Republican secretary of state of Nevada who ran a fair election and rejected spurious arguments that the election was stolen. The message that these actions send to politicians is that if you want a future in state Republican politics, you had better be willing to manipulate election results or lie about election fraud.
Republican state legislatures have also passed or are considering laws aimed at stripping Democratic counties of the power to run fair elections. The new Georgia law gives the legislature the power to handpick an election official who could vote on the state election board for a temporary takeover of up to four county election boards during the crucial period of administering an election and counting votes. That provision appears to be aimed at Democratic counties like Fulton County that have increased voter access. A new Iowa law threatens criminal penalties against local election officials who enact emergency election rules and bars them from sending voters unsolicited absentee ballot applications. …
the International Energy Agency says global energy demand will rebound by 4.6% this year, led by a 4.5% jump in coal burning..so someone better go out and buy some carbon offsets quick so it doesn’t affect the climate..
I think Kevin Drum is right here. Meanwhile, stop wasting our mental and fiscal resources playing around on Mars, which has the impact of a College Road Trip for smart people. “Geoengineering is our future. I am not in favor of geoengineering. Nobody with a room temperature IQ is in favor of geoengineering. Nevertheless, the world has shown no willingness to take the collective action needed to address climate change, and it’s unlikely that a fabulous new invention will do the job either. Around 2040 or so this will become obvious and the only alternative will be some sort of geoengineering. So we’ll do it. This means that we should be studying every possible form of geoengineering now so that if we end up doing it, at least we have some idea of what we’re getting ourselves into.”https://jabberwocking.com/
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160425-how-a-giant-space-umbrella-could-stop-global-warming
A Tiny Part’s Big Ripple: Global Chip Shortage Hobbles the Auto IndustryAlmost every carmaker has had to curtail production, hampering the economic recovery.
https://www.salon.com/2021/04/23/donald-trump-relocating-to-new-jersey-to-jumpstart-fundraising-efforts-for-2024-campaign-report/
EMichael You appear to be hoping our collective IQ will go up with the room temperature. It’s not enough we have polluted our planet to the point of death, you want to let the quack doctors finish the job in the grand manner. We won’t even raise our gas tax to save our planet. That tells you what we are as a species. Superstitious ignoramuses who believe a fairy will come to save us at no cost to ourselves. Sure, we can stop drinking any time we want. Tomorrow for sure. [not all superstition is about “god.” We have “Science,”]
CEO Pay Remains Stratospheric, Even at Companies Battered by Pandemic While millions of people struggled to make ends meet, many of the companies hit hardest in 2020 showered their executives with riches.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/business/ceos-pandemic-compensation.html?smid=tw-share… The coronavirus plunged the world into an economic crisis, sent the U.S. unemployment rate skyrocketing and left millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet. Yet at many of the companies hit hardest by the pandemic, the executives in charge were showered with riches. …The divergent fortunes of C.E.O.s and everyday workers illustrate the sharp divides in a nation on the precipice of an economic boom but still racked by steep income inequality. The stock markets are up and the wealthy are spending freely, but millions are still facing significant hardship. Executives are minting fortunes while laid-off workers line up at food banks.“Many of these C.E.O.s have improved profitability by laying off workers,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, who has proposed new taxes on the ultrawealthy. “A tiny handful of people who have shimmied all the way to the top of the greasy pole get all of the rewards, while everyone else gets left behind.” …
Young people are politically engaged, pro-Biden, and depressed, study finds https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/24/metro/young-people-are-politically-engaged-pro-biden-depressed-study-finds/?event=event25via @BostonGlobe
Earlier this week, Florida Republicans enacted a law they claimed would prevent riots in the state. Its real purpose, of course, was to discourage protesting and punish demonstrators. One of the bill’s provisions has received a fair amount of national attention, as it seems to give Floridians permission to attack protesters with their cars. The bill doesn’t exactly make it legal to run someone over, but it does shield drivers from civil liability if they injure or kill protesters on Florida roads.In isolation, it’s hard to understand the purpose of such a curious provision. What problem does it solve? As the Florida American Civil Liberties Union pointed out, very few recent protests in the state involved violence or even vandalism, and police and prosecutors were already well equipped (some would say, more than well equipped) to handle whatever rioting might occur. If demonstrators blocking roads and snarling up traffic were a serious problem in Florida in need of a legislative remedy, surely thoughtful legislators could come up with a more effective or ethical response than making it less personally risky for people to injure or kill those demonstrators with cars. But efficacy and ethics don’t really seem to be guiding the decisions of Republican-run state legislatures lately.To understand what’s really behind the bill, recall that it comes less than four years after a 20-year-old neo-Nazi named James Alex Fields Jr. deliberately drove a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of people counterprotesting the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fields injured scores of people and killed a woman named Heather Heyer. The obvious and immediate response to this intentional attack was nearly universal shock and horror. Fields was charged with murder and convicted. But since just before that attack, and even more so after it, Republican elected officials across the country have been trying to make it easier for certain people to run over certain other people.Ari Weil, a researcher at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, counted six states that considered laws shielding drivers who attack protesters in 2017, but most of those “hit and kill” bills (as the ACLU refers to them) went nowhere. It took a few more years for the right-wing propaganda apparatus to fully numb conservative consciences, and prepare them to openly endorse an idea as plainly depraved as this one. In the meantime, the car attacks kept coming: In 2020, Weil tracked “72 incidents of cars driving into protesters across 52 different cities,” over the span of just over a month. The online far right memed about running over demonstrators regularly, and cops openly encouraged it in social media comments. Cops also, in cities such as New York and Detroit, participated in the practice themselves. In Boston last year, Police Sergeant Clifton McHale was recorded on a police body camera bragging about hitting demonstrators with a police cruiser. He was placed on administrative leave when that footage was surfaced by reporter Eoin Higgins. He is now, Higgins reports, back on desk duty.*Now lawmakers seem to have overcome whatever reticence they may once have felt about formally endorsing automobile attacks. Five states besides Florida introduced similar bills this year, granting some form of immunity to people running into demonstrators. The Iowa measure passed the state House and awaits Senate approval. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt just signed another version into law in his state. This one shields attacking drivers from criminal liability.The impetus for the Oklahoma bill, according to the Republican lawmaker who authored it, was an incident in which a pickup truck driver drove into a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Tulsa, paralyzing one person. The driver claimed to be scared and, notably, was not charged with a crime. That is to say that it was apparently already legal to drive into protesters in Oklahoma; these politicians merely helped clarify that fact.A few years ago, most people would have seen “politically motivated vehicle attacks” as a terrorist tactic pioneered by ISIS. Now American police regularly carry out these kinds of attacks, and Republican policymakers have officially endorsed the practice.There’s something very telling about how the car (or police cruiser, or truck, or SUV) has been enshrined into law as an instrument of state-sanctioned violence. American conservatives are creating, really, a sort of Second Amendment for cars. Not the Second Amendment in terms of the literal text in the Constitution, but the Second Amendment as existing doctrine. The legal framework conservative politicians and jurists spent years crafting and refining to facilitate politicized and racialized gun violence in this country is now expanding to another of America’s omnipresent and deadly institutions. …
Space-based solar power won’t be just a sci-fi dream forever, if things go according to the U.S. Air Force’s plans. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is developing a project called SSPIDR (“Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research”), which aims to mature the technology needed to harvest solar energy in space and beam it down for use on Earth. … The AFRL envisions sunlight-harvesting satellites equipped with innovative “sandwich tiles,” which will convert solar energy into radio frequency (RF) power and beam it to Earth. Down here, receiving antennas will transform that RF energy into usable power. …
U.S. to Send Virus-Ravaged India Materials for Vaccines – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
DobbsThe Right to Crash Cars into People. well, of course. if you are going to take away their guns what else can they do? Hah! Now let’s see you take away people’s cars! actually this is the sort of idea that would naturally occur to people in Florida. when i was there it was fun for pickup drivers to see how close they could come to bicycle riders. there were no painted shoulders on Florida roads at the time, so I suppose it was not actually illegal. In fact, at the first college I went to, some future Florida legislators didn’t like the way I was dressed, so they drove past me on my bicycle and one of them leaned out of the window of the car and hit me with a rolled up newspaper. now you’re going to call a newspaper a deadly weapon? as it happened i caught up with them at the next stop sign and pulled mr newspaperman out through the widow of the car. the result of this was that i got called into the dean’s office and yelled at.
Space Based Solar Power Well, at least I recognize insanity when I see it.