From what I can see, it appears the FBI was very insistent upon the possibility of a 2016 DNC-style hack. I don't think this is necessarily unreasonable until the election is settled - that the hack didn't happen doesn't mean you could conclude it wouldn't were you in the months leading up to the election.
It's not clear it's the FBI's role is to prevent disclosure of information from something like the 2016 DNC-style hack. They could arguably be charged with preventing such hacks, but going further than that runs into first amendment issues real quick.
In September 2020, Roth and others partook of a tabletop exercise to simulate a "hack and dump" operation regarding the Biden campaign. The goal was apparently to "shape" how the media would respond.
I'd also separately be very interested in the background behind things like the Aspen Digital meetup cited here, given other summaries. The Aspen Institute is technically a NGO, but it'd also be trivial for it to act as a cutout for government agencies, and Garrett himself has a comfy relationship to the FBI specifically.
Maybe there's some more plausible explanation, given everything else; perhaps the Aspen Digital wargame also had a few dozen other examples ranging from red-tribe-leaning to the non-political. But the incredible specificity to something that the FBI knew or should have known could have occurred without a foreign intelligence nexus (either their own people leaking, or Hunter fucking up somewhere they couldn't clean up fast enough) is... looking like at best the FBI trying to clean up potential problems ahead of time.
A secondary objection of mine is the blurring of public and private boundary with how intelligence officials and agencies were coordinating with and sharing classified information with these companies in an effort to get them on-board with doing work for the FBI. It's difficult to articulate what I precisely find problematic here.
I think the trivial objection is that far less direct entanglement has been treated as a violation of rights as a government actor in other environments. I'm sure the FBI's lawyers signed it off and no one would have standing to challenge it anyway, but the extent and degree that the FBI here appears to be pushing and providing recompense to people for the purpose of limiting political speech is a big deal, and worse than I expected to find.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Duncan v. Bonta drops, again:
Here, a stay is appropriate.
First, we conclude that the Attorney General is likely to succeed on the merits. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Supreme Court reiterated that “[l]ike most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” 142 S. Ct. 2111, 2128 (2022) (quoting Dist. of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 626 (2008)). The Attorney General makes strong arguments that Section 32310 comports with the Second Amendment under Bruen. Notably, ten other federal district courts have considered a Second Amendment challenge to large-capacity magazine restrictions since Bruen was decided. Yet only one of those courts—the Southern District of Illinois—granted a preliminary injunction, finding that the challenge was likely to succeed on the merits.
It's not surprising to find the 9th Circuit finding in favor of a gun control law at en banc, though some people are surprised that the vote was the exact same as before SCOTUS sent it back down. No firebreathing VanDyke dissent this time, and while it's somewhat funny that I can predict exactly how well Hurwitz's 'it's just a temporary emergency stay!' aged like fine milk, it's still disappointing he couldn't be bothered to either vote differently or provide a deeper analysis of Bruen as a concurrence. There's some fun discussion from Nelson about whether the 9th circuit's newly-created comeback rule is compliant with federal law, and apparently the court claims that it'll even request briefings on the matter... but since five of the judges out of eleven in the en banc panel are those newly-senior judges that the law does not allow on en banc panels, I don't think it'll be any more compelling to them than the violation of process back in 2020 were when they were doing it explicitly.
The fun part is the explicit text of that original order: "Judgment VACATED and case REMANDED for further consideration in light of New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U. S. ___ (2022).". That quote, above? Is all that the 9th Circuit's en banc panel did, in terms of considering Bruen. As Butamay points out :
Despite this clear direction, our court once again swats down another Second Amendment challenge. On what grounds? Well, the majority largely doesn’t think it worthy of explanation. Rather than justify California’s law by looking to our historical tradition as Bruen commands, the majority resorts to simply citing various non-binding district court decisions. There’s no serious engagement with the Second Amendment’s text. No grappling with historical analogues. No putting California to its burden of proving the constitutionality of its law. All we get is a summary order, even after the Supreme Court directly ordered us to apply Bruen to this very case. The Constitution and Californians deserve better.
Does this count as massive resistance to a direct order from the Supreme Court? I'm sure someone (if not huadpe, now?) could argue otherwise: emergency stays with perfunctory logical support are not exactly unusual, and the majority do mention Bruen for almost a whole paragraph. But it's more plausible to read this the opposite direction, especially given the Court's willingness to punt on procedural issues whenever plausible (and sometimes even when not). Getting GVR'd repeatedly and with increasingly strict-yet-ignored direction is nothing to party about, but it isn't a loss, either. You can make a media spotlight out of it, if you're on the 'right' side, but that's not the real motivation.
It's another two or four years to enforce unconstitutional laws, to mark those who don't comply with an unconstitutional law as felons, to build alternative methods to harass and exclude those who comply but don't agree, to cost your opponents tremendous amounts of money (only a fraction of which they may get back), and to wait for the composition of the Supreme Court to change or be changed.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The 'social contagion' theory isn't implausible, although I think no small number of pro-trans people would frame it instead as people who were already trans but now realized that they were and that it was possible to do something about it. And they're not exactly wrong : it's rude to make guesses about people before/unless they come out, but the transhumanist philosophy (and even transhumanist aestheticists) has had no small number of people who have had decades-long fascinations with body transformation as a form of self-improvement who weren't exactly a surprise when they turned out to be trans.
((FTM examples exist, but are small-crowd enough that I'm not hugely comfortable linking them.))
There's some important philosophical and pragmatic arguments about this even within the pro-trans framework -- not everyone who thinks those thoughts actually wants them, some who want something end up in some non-binary variant, and there are a variety of tradeoffs and physical limitations of existing technology such that even people who want to transition might be better-served by using some things and not others in a way that's getting obfuscated by a lot of mainstream discourse.
However, even outside of that, both perspectives have missed that they're looking at a metric, not a measure. You don't have a magical "this many people are trans" marker any more than you have a good definition of what being "trans" even is, but under that you don't really have good measures on even specific events. "How many people are using Tavestock" isn't the same thing as even "how many people are injecting sex hormones", as anyone who's noticed bodybuilders can guess. There already was a small industry of XX-chromosone'd people injecting testosterone, going butch as hell, and wanting to be called "sir" in the late-90s; there's some fun discussions about whether they're more trans now that they've been able to get hysterectomies easier, but it's not exactly the most practical of questions.
And there's been a lot of moving these to be higher-visibility, both in the general sense (trans pride) and in the seeing-like-a-state one (required coverage for insurance providers, changing rules for various government IDs). I don't think it's enough to explain the entire change, but it makes any attempt to use the metrics without acknowledging their limitations more than a little frustrating.
Rahami dropped today.
It's about what I and @The_Nybbler expected, and worse a Roberts opinion at that. Roberts did "not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber", and lower courts will quite happily take his already-extensive 'analogies' to permit nearly anything. Barrett continues to parade "Since the founding, our Nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms” and promise that this isn't a blanket permission slip for lower courts to turn into an interest-balancing approach that never recognizes gun owner interests, and no one with two brain cells to rub together should believe it. The progressives continue to argue in favor of overturning Bruen (and, implicitly, Heller), and beyond that just making that blanket permission no-gunnie-interest interest-balancing test the rule instead.
There's a separate Gorsuch concurrence, but, unsurprisingly, it is not going into the fine details of esoteric interpretations in some way that might help Second Amendment causes, and instead just to announce how much the court is punting.
In theory, the concurrences draw out a large array of other challenges to the same statute that would be more suspect, but we're several years -- and several far more sympathetic cases -- into SCOTUS punting on them, there's no way to bring a challenge without risking your freedom, and no guarantee that you'd not find yourself Abramski'd even if you did. The most optimistic gloss I can read is a bit of text for Range, but Range doesn't even have cert yet, and I would not be surprised to see him GVR'd for another three-year-delay.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I am nothing if not petty, but you invited me.
If you want me to stop, tell me to stop, and I'll stop.
Prestige Biotech
TIME reported:
Recently, many California residents were disturbed to learn that a small, privately-operated bio lab in the Central Valley town of Reedley was shut down by Fresno County Department of Public Health officials after they found that it had been improperly managing almost 1,000 laboratory mice and samples of infectious diseases including COVID-19, rubella, malaria, dengue, chlamydia, hepatitis, and HIV. The lab was registered to a company called Prestige Biotech that sold a variety of medical testing kits, including for pregnancy and COVID-19, and it was likely storing disease samples for the purpose of developing and validating its testing kits. Government authorities are still investigating the company’s history, but it appears to have previously operated a lab in Fresno under the name Universal MediTech, where city officials flagged it for investigation regarding improperly stored chemicals.
This, if anything, seems to be an understatement, since the initial federal investigation starts with:
On September 6, 2023, the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (“Select Committee”) issued its first subpoena as part of its ongoing investigation into theillegal facility that local authorities uncovered in Reedley, California.The subpoena, signed by the Chairman with an on-site visit by the Select Committee’s Chief Investigative Counsel and two investigative staffers, uncovered thousands of pages of documents, hundreds of photographs, and hours of video.This evidence, alongside interviews of local officials and other investigative steps, revealed troubling gaps in federal pathogen safeguards. These gaps allowed a wanted fugitive from Canada, who is a PRC national who had previously stolen millions of dollars of American intellectual property, to operate an illegal facility that contained “thousands of vials of potentially infectious agents” in Reedley, California.
and quickly turns to :
Approximately 1,000 mice were kept in inhumane, overcrowded conditions.When local officials asked a worker who “appeared to be in control” of the mice, she replied that they were transgenic mice that simulate the human immune system that were “genetically engineered to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus.” In subsequent interviews with individuals who were at the warehouse, local officials learned that workers were tasked with caring and cleaning for the mice and, on numerous occasions, the Reedley Biolab operators had held back their pay.One of the workers who tended to the mice told Officer Harper that he and his children had become sick close in time to when he was tending the mice.The worker stated that he was instructed to discard any dead mice that he found into a dumpster...
The CDC did not note an Ebola label on the freezer in its report. When asked about the freezer labeled Ebola in a subsequent email, the CDC official noted that the CDC “would typically look for the vial to be labeled as Ebola,”that they “didn’t recall seeing a fridge labeled as Ebola,”and asked for a photograph of the freezer. A photograph was not available. The Select Committee has received written statements reporting the presence of the label.
The AP has a... more forgiving description, though that's damning with the extent it bends over backwards. Let's all get the obvious jokes out of our systems first. My personal favorite so far is "I didn't even know there was a wet market in Fresno", but if you have a particularly good one (maybe Black Dynamite?), fire away.
There's a bit of an obvious question, here, and it's "what the fuck".
And there is a plausible, charitable explanation. Looking at the current charges that fugitive from Canada is facing, it's quite possible that this lab was genuinely making lab tests, using these viral agents and lab mice to validate each batch, and just took 'move fast, break things' to an extreme level. Even the Ebola-labeled fridge, if it did have ebola samples, could maybe be about various biosensor demands that even pre-COVID were already being floated around; it's also possible that Zhu just got the thing on discount from a normal lab and didn't wipe off the marker. If that was the case, perhaps the strangest thing is here's that the scuzzy Engrish medical stuff marketed by a fraudster with a couple different IDs with different names on them, was actually trying and moderately-'real', even if it also had tremendous unnecessary risk and iffy environmental awareness. The criminal complaint even has a dedicated note for :
Despite media reports that UMI and PBI may have been manufacturing bioweapons, no evidence supporting those reports has been found to date. Any and all pathogens and toxins that have been found during the government’s investigation appear to be related to the manufacture and distribution of various IVD test kits.
... but that answer is a little complicated by rough questions about who, if anyone, has actually been looking. Beyond the CDC's apparent unwillingness or inability to test any of the samples found at the lab, it's not clear where they came from, or what Prestige would have been doing with them. Prestige mostly sold pregnancy tests, drug tests, so on.
And the charitable story has more than a few holes: none of the public documents show much evidence of Prestige BioTech's ability to manufacture the scale or variety of tests that they published, and the congressional investigation suggests that the company may have simply relabeled non-US-manufactured (and possibly non-US-certified) ones. It's illegal to import many of the found infectious agents without a license that Prestige did not have, and so the CDC may have presumed that they were provided by US companies... but it's a little worrying if some rando can order supplies of dengue or malaria without anyone caring. Compared to what happens if you try to order the wrong chemicals from a supply shop, that'd actually be worse.
... but it's not clear what, if any, alternative explanation would make more sense. Assuming for the sake of argument that Zhu is an undercover agent for the Chinese government, they don't exactly need James Bond to get Dengue fever samples. Nor would someone wanting to mix up bioweapons find it particularly useful to save on shipping by doing in-situ development. Perhaps there's something particularly funky about these particular breeds of transgenic mice, and given Zhu's previous modeus operandi of stealing biotech IP that would be in line with other practices, but there's no obvious way to get there from here, and a ton of inexplicable chaff around that. Maybe if the biological samples were meant as literal chaff and contained entirely different materials, in the sense that no sane person would test them for 'normal' corporate espionage?
That's further complicated by the federal investigation's general unwillingness to conduct the sort of testing or investigation necessary to assuage concerns; even were this particular case fully in the 'scuzzy Enrish dropshipper' category, the feds don't seem to have or be interested in getting the information necessary to demonstrate that. The charitable view, I suppose, is that the CDC runs into variations of this problem a lot (!) and doesn't think there's much to be gained from knowing the scale of the issue (!!) rather than simply spooling up the vacuum cleaners. Which... isn't especially good.
Some previous discussion here more contemporaneous to the original indictment.
The court's first amendment analysis at the motion to dismiss phase is here, but not very compelling. The denial of motion to dismiss summarizes it in courtlistener as :
"18 U.S.C. § 241 as applied in the Indictment does not, as a matter of law, violate the First Amendment because although the case involves false utterances, it is at its core, about conspiracy and injury, not speech. To the extent that the case does implicate the First Amendment, it is constitutional under the standard for false utterances set forth by the Supreme Court in United States v. Alvarez . 132 S. Ct. 2537 (2012). Although Defendant Mackey contends that the false utterances are protected as satirical speech, that is an issue of fact for the jury."
There's a few specific comparisons, but they're pretty limited to largely slapping the fraud exception onto things.
And the DoJ's comparable case from an earlier motion is almost universally non-speech matters:
It is beyond question that the right to vote may be injured by non-threatening means. See e.g., United States v. Saylor, 322 U.S. 385 (1944) (ballot stuffing); United States v. Classic, 313 U.S. 299 (1941) (manipulating ballots and false certification); United States v. Mosley, 238 U.S. 383 (1915) (omitting ballots); United States v. Haynes, 1992 WL 296782 (6th Cir. 1992) (unpublished) (withholding ballots); United States v. Stone, 188 F. 836 (D. Md. 1911) (confusing ballots)...
... For example, in Anderson, the Supreme Court affirmed a Section 241 conviction because the defendant’s casting of fictitious ballots “injure[d] the right of all voters in a federal election to express their choice of a candidate and to have their expressions of choice given full value and effect.” 417 U.S. at 226; see also United States v. Weston, 417 F.2d 181, 183 (4th Cir. 1969) (“[I]t has been established in this circuit that the procurement of absentee ballots in violation of state election laws is indictable under 241.”) ...
... Consistent with the Supreme Court’s holding in Anderson, courts have long held that Section 241 prohibits deceptive or misleading behavior intended to deprive voters of their constitutional right to vote. In Stone, the court found that a conspiracy to print misleading or confusing ballots that made it easier for a person of limited literacy to vote for a Democrat than a Republican violated a predecessor of Section 241. 188 F. at 839-40.
or involve professional speech that's been long-excluded in very specific contexts:
Indeed, deception that injures other constitutional rights has also been found to violate Section 241. For example, courts have approved the use of Sections 241 and 242 to prosecute police officers who violate the Fourth Amendment by making false statements in search warrant affidavits, conduct that, like the defendant’s, includes misleading words. See United States v. Melendez, 2004 WL 162937 (E.D. Mich. Jan. 20, 2004) (denying motion to dismiss in Section 241 case). Melendez and a Sixth Circuit case, United States v. Bradfield, 2000 WL 1033022 (6th Cir. July 18, 2000), involve, among other things, “falsified police reports” that injured the right under the Fourth Amendment to be free from unreasonable searches. Melendez, 2004 WL 162937, at *8. The Melendez court held that, “[b]ased on these cases, the conduct alleged in the indictment is unlawful according to pre-existing law and satisfies the fair warning concern of Lanier,” and it denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss. Id., (citing United States v. Lanier, 520 U.S. 259 (1997))
It'd be funny if this was the case that got SCOTUS to categorically disfavor any untrue speech, given the various changes to the bench, but it's more likely Mackey just has it disappear in a bunch of inventive decisions by state courts of appeal. As back in 2021, I can't see any way to merge this with existing jurisprudence -- 18 USC 241 is just far too ludicrously vague and broad, even if a law specifically about election-specific lies might be acceptable -- but I dunno how much that matters if no one's going to make this a cause celebre.
I don't think there is a particularly severe difference between the Baltimore Professional Services Agreement and the contractual repayments present here, nor between the exclusivity of reading 9-11 reports in the Baltimore case and the access to classified documents in this one, or to the extent such a difference exists, that it favors the FBI here.
EDIT: to be clear, I think they fall under the state actor doctrine, too: it's the too that's an emphasis.
The Loudon County Special Grand Jury final report has been released. [previous discussion here]
For a summary of the background: Loudoun County School District had a possibly-gender-something student sexually assault a much-younger female student who the assailant had a previous relationship with at Stone Bridge High School (SBHS) on May 28th, 2021. While eventually arrested, state law limits pre-trial detention to 21-days for this class of juvenile, and the assailant was transfered to Broad Run High School (BRHS) for the next school year. The father of this first victim was expelled from the school on the day of the assault, and later arrested by the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office (LCSO) during a school board (LCSB) meeting where he confronted or was confronted by someone (not a part of the school board?). On October 6th, the assailant further abducted and sexually assaulted another female student at BRHS.
Get used to the acronyms; the report uses them everywhere.
The report is... a read. With apologies for transcription errors:
Later that evening, a school board member asked the superintendent "do we have assaults in our bathrooms or in our locker rooms, regularly? I would hope not but I'd like clarification." The superintendent responded, "to my knowledge we don't have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms." The SBHS principle, who attended the Teams meeting with the superintendent the afternoon the SBHS sexual assault took place, testified the superintendent's statement "is not true." Another witness testified the superintendent's statement was a "bald-faced lie." We agree.
There's two separate failures, here, that I think are worth discussion and highlighting. One is the more overt culture war, and the grand jury report does make very clear that the culture war drove a lot of bad practice. It's a little hard to tell since the report uses roles rather than names for everything, but it seems like even the last fig leaf Superintendent Zeigler was using about the controversial school board meeting, that he assumed the questions were about policy 8040-related sexual assaults rather than sexual assaults in general, was not actually true either, as an half-hour before the email previously made available, it turns out that:
At 3:30PM the chief operating officer emailed the superintendent, the now-deputy superintendent, chief of staff, directory of communications, and assistant superintendent, [stating in part]:
The incident at SBHS is related to policy 8040.
With extreme charity, perhaps this refers to the father’s near arrest, and not the rape itself, but that doesn’t absolve much.
At the same time, there's another disturbing component that I think a lot of 'mainstream' conservative critiques are likely to overlook:
The special education teaching assistant later said she saw two pairs of feet under the stall, but she did nothing about it. She testified this was not an uncommon occurrence, because "somebody could have their period. They might need a tampon. Or somebody had a boyfriend they had a fight with." The assailant later acknowledge that "They usually don't do anything" regarding two pairs of feet in a stall. After the teaching assistant left, the assailant again forced penetration against the female student...
That is, a teaching assistant -- in Virginia, a mandatory reporter -- walked past a bathroom stall where a violent rape was in-progress and, once the teaching assistant left, continued. Further, that this was not an unusual mistake, but enough of a practice that it was recognized by the offender. It's quite possible that Superintendent Ziegler was making a bald-faced lie not in the sense that this particular sexual assault occurred in a bathroom, but that there is little effort or interest in preventing dubiously consensual sexual behavior in bathrooms between students at all.
And this continued more broadly. On the day of the assault, the report details how the school was more intent on expelling an angry father and seeking a no-trespass order against him (e-mail at 3:09), even suggesting that the father "should have been arrested", than tracking down the at-large rapist (who was only grabbed at the end of the school day). Even once arrested, the local police showed little interest in bringing the case.
And even once that was done, there was a complex game of blame- and paperwork-passing that seemed optimized to lose track of things, and not just for this specific case.
However, juvenile intake did not call the superintendent's office, email the superintendent's office, or send a copy of the notification through the mail. Instead, the process in place at the time was to send it via inter-office envelope that was picked up at the courthouse. Further, the envelope was addressed to "David Spage," who is an LCPS employee but has not worked in the superintendent's office since 2014...
During the calendar year 2021, there were 39 school notifications sent [in this method], but it is unknown how many of those the superintendent's office ever saw.
((SBHS seemed to think the student had transferred to SBHS from another high school, THS, over similar allegations. The grand jury report says that this probably is confused and didn't happen? Which is another level of wtf, maybe.))
This continued even as other warning signs kept scaling up.
In the ensuing weeks after the assailant was released from custody, the court services unit learned information from the assailant's family that cause them to "keep a tight eye on this kid."
This included, separately, the assailant's grandmother and mother both requesting additional assistance from schools and the probation officer, with the grandmother calling the assailant a "sociopath."
In early September, the assailant had separate incidents at the new school, first following female students around school long enough to result in an art class shuffling the assailant's seating around, and then a more serious incident in an English classroom where the assailant tried to take a female student's Chromebook, and asked the female student about online nudes (and another boy if the boy's grandmother had online nudes?). This was escalated, yet:
The most senior individuals in LCPS knew about this incident, and knew is was the same person who had committed the May 28, 2021 sexual assault. Multiple people in the LCSO were aware of this incident around the time it occurred and kenw it was the same person who had committed the May 28, 2021 sexual assault. The deputy commonwealth's attorney prosecuting the May 28, 2021 case knew of the incident, and the probation officer, who had been communicating with the student and his family nearly daily for over a month, knew of the incident.
Not a single person with knowledge of the student's history or of this current action stepped in to do anything. Instead, discipline was left to the BRHS principal, who did nothing more than issue him a verbal reprimand.
On October 6th, this escalated to a second sexual assault, this time with the assailant abducting a female student without a fig leaf of a pre-existing relationship.
In "late October", the school commissioned an independent review of the incidents at hand. However:
Many board members were surprised to learn the report was subject to the attorney-client privilege.... Several board members testified they were given only half an hour to read the independent review and ask questions about it. Despite having asked for the review in the first place, they were handed out numbered copies of it and required to return it upon leaving the room. On January 14, 2022, LCSB [County School Board] issued a public statement stating the report would not be released, listing the attorney-client privilege as the third, and least-important, reason for keeping it private. The statement [link] also noted several changes and updates to LCPS [County Public Schools] policies and procedures.
It's hard to summarize exactly how much of a shitshow this was, but :
The director of school administration disagreed with this assessment [that they could not proceed until police completed their investigation] and had conversations with the chief of staff about it in July and August 2021. The director, even those his office was not supposed to be doing Title IX, also created a Google document of possible Title IX violations reported from schools because he was "worried at the time that we were not reporting some things that could become Title IX."...
On September 17th, 2021, the director of school administration testified he emailed the superintendent, chief of staff, deputy superintendent, and chief of schools, about the situation. He testified the email laid out his extensive training, experts he had met with, and the fact the SBHS assault should have "immediately" and "automatically" triggered an investigation. It is unknown how the superintendent or these officials responded - LCPS refused to provide us this email -- but it was not until a month later, and after the BRHS sexual assault, that a Title IX investigation into the SBHS sexual assault was opend. The individual who ultimately conducted that investigation testified it was the first Title IX investigation she had ever done.
[Previous discussion here or here or here or here or here)
There's an interesting Atlantic article here. I don't particularly believe or disbelieve its central thrust -- that ice cream has a variety of possible health benefits -- for reasons I'll get into later, but one particular quote is rather startling if considered in any serious depth:
“The conclusions weren’t exactly accurately written,” acknowledged Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of policy at Tufts’s nutrition school and a co-author of the paper, when he revisited the data with me in an interview.
St_Rev pointed out that this is actually academic misconduct, but it's worth spelling how obvious this has been for over half a decade, even as no one called a spade a spade. Mozaffarian's conclusions say, in front the paywall, that "Higher intake of yogurt is associated with a reduced risk of T2D, whereas other dairy foods and consumption of total dairy are not appreciably associated with incidence of T2D." Behind the paywall, we instead find that not only did his methods give as good a set of results for ice cream, they gave better numbers in most, on a pleasant and cheerful chart that the peer reviewers either did not read or did not find incompatible with the paper's summary. So at least one author, with no small career or current-day position considers this the sort of thing that you casually joke about to a national-tier journalist, who in turn considers it not particularly worthy of highlighting.
Surely this is some schmuck that doesn't matter, widdling away his days in a glorified broom closet, writing papers no one cares to read at all?
Well, no. PubMed shows 125 papers citing "Dairy consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes", Google Scholar gives over 400 citations. St_Rev points to his efforts on a hilariously bad and hilarious broad Food Compass proposal, though at least that proposal largely hit a dead end. But he's gotten appointed to federal boards by Presidents. That's not automatically going to make him the next Wansink, who managed to change contents of store shelves across America based on numbers he just made up -- it's not even like Mozaffarian's known misconduct is even a small fraction as bad! It's a nitpick, ultimately, and one that may eventually not even fall to Mozaffarian as opposed to some coauthor.
But it's not a nitpick anyone cares about.
Now, that's just nutrition science. Everyone knows the entire field's garbage, whether or not it drives policy; the literature is filled with hilarious stories like this, and not just starting from inside.
What about medicine and materials safety? Those who've read [Scott's recent review of Rob Knight's From Oversight to Overkill will have seen a small mention of research misconduct:
This changed in 1998. A Johns Hopkins doctor tested a new asthma treatment. A patient got sick and died. Fingers were pointed. Congress got involved. Grandstanding Congressmen competed to look Tough On Scientific Misconduct by yelling at Gary Ellis, head of the Office For Protection From Research Risks.
The full story is a little boring, so to tl;dr: Doctor Alkis Togias proposed a study where healthy volunteers would first reduce some parasympathetic nervous system response using hexamethonium bromide, then use to methacholine induce asthma attacks. By doing so, they could better understand the role the parasympathetic nervous system had on asthma.
((name recognition is !!fun!!))
While methacholine was commonly used for this purpose, hexamethonium was not; it had started out as an anti-hypertension drug and had largely fallen off the market as other, better drugs in that class arrived. This wasn't exactly a treatment, contra Scott, so much as an attempt to test specific models of asthma. In many ways that made the death of a volunteer in the trial more shocking. It's not entirely clear what exactly happened -- Ellen Roche first reported feeling ill before the hexamethonium exposure -- but it's pretty likely that the drug was a large part of why her lungs failed. What drove the sizable regulatory response, though, was that the risks of Hexamethonium Bromide exposure were Known in older literature... kinda.
Togias had four studies safe showing use of the drug, some for similar pulmonary research. Older papers pointing to some were harder to find at the time, but even if located it's not clear how relevant they'd be. The studies he did locate were small studies, totaling only 20 participants, but not only were they allowed under similar IRB reviews, they didn't describe even minor complications.
... with an emphasis on "describe":
It's not clear how robust the other three studies were, when it came to accurate description of the observed behavior, but that single study would have given 10%, alone enough reason to take a closer review. (Lest this come across as a defense of Dr. Togias, one of his own patients had this class of side effects just days before Mrs. Roche's fatal exposure; Togias did not report those complaints nor wait until the ill patient recovered.)
In the intervening decades and in response to the death of Mrs. Roche, medical studies have expanded the extent side effects are reported to review boards. If you wonder how well that would have help someone reading through the papers, who did not have access to the internal review board records of distant schools? Well...
Space is an in thing right now, so what about space? 1I/‘Oumuamua is a space thing, that got into a lot of news reports as the first interstellar object, including this paper in Nature arguing that it was an ice comet with some interesting traits. In response, Avi Loeb argues instead that the calculations used in the Nature paper are entirely incorrect. Which happens, if true. What's more interesting is how Loeb claims Nature responded, when faced with a question of fact:
By now, the Nature paper was celebrated by science journalists worldwide. When I informed one of them about the temperature miscalculation earlier today, he told me that his journal will not post a correction to its original report in order “not to confuse the readers.”
Now, Loeb is a bit of a nutjob eccentric advocate of thinking outside the box. And we only have his word that his physical models are more correct, or that Nature editors say what he claimed.
Of course, if he is a nutjob, he's a nutjob feted by a hefty list of big names and organizations, including Harvard and the President. More critically, he's got no shortage of papers in high impact journals, both conventional papers and op-eds in Nature, none with asterisks. So either Nature isn't willing to correct a paper whoopsied thermodynamics, or is willing to publish this style of author, or both.
Well, it's not like normal people do anything with space. Outside of speculative fiction and some astrophotography, few of us are ever going to need to think more than a few hundred miles away from terra firma. Even for scientists working in the field, it's not like anyone's putting Freeman Dyson's blueprints to action. So there isn't much value riding on things, really, beyond people's egos.
Speaking of egos, anyone heard of the Hirsch-Dias feud in superconductors? Jorge Hirsch is best-known for the proposing the H-index metric in academic publishing, but more charitably also for a number of models to explain high-temperature superconductivity. Ranga Dias is the leader of a team working out of the University of Rochester, doing high-temperature high-pressure superconductivity work, some of which conflicts with Hirsch's models. If you read a pop-sci article about carbons-sulfur-hydrogen superconductors, metallic hydrogen, or lutetium hydride, his lab's the actual group in question. The two don't like each other, and it's been a recursive mess of papers seeking retractions being removed. Right now it's looking mostly like Hirsch called it, though there are still some Dias defenders, in no small part because a few of the challenged works were replicated or 'replicated' by other labs collaborating with Dias. The latter option is a damning indictment of international condensed matter research.
I don't own a diamond anvil. There's only a few major labs around the world that do, and of those not all experiments are trying to replicate this stuff. Why would anyone care?
(Outside of diamond anvils being pretty expensive to use as glorified magic-8 balls, and teams of physicists not being cheap either.)
There was a snafu around a different proposed superconductor in August, with significant coverage and attention after a coffee merchant on Twitter gave pretty long (and somewhat overstated) list of possible (if not likely) benefits. Somehow, the grapevine produced a feeding frenzy as increasingly varied hobbyists tried to mix the stuff up, sometimes literally in their kitchens. It turned out to not work, to the surprise of absolutely no one who's followed superconductor revolutions in the past. Indeed, the biggest surprise is that this seemed to be an honest and weird result which simply failed to pan out, rather than the typical fraud or instrument error.
Dan Garisto criticized this while the various LK99 replication efforts were cooking, as science as a live sporting event, where hype distorts funding and attention to near-random focuses. It's a little awkward a criticism coming from Garisto, who's a 'science journalist' himself with no small impact on where people focus (and it's not clear Scientific American proper lives up to his standards, but it's not wrong: several labs looked at and spent a couple days reviewing a series of papers that otherwise would have only received minimal attention. That's why we're pretty sure the initial experiments were performed as described, but mismeasured diamagnetism and semiconductor behavior. There's still some people looking at LK99-related research, and I might even put it very slightly more likely than all of Dias' work panning out, but that's damning with faint praise.
The alternative to serious replication isn't "we saved time on something from testing something that was useless." It's not knowing, one way or the other.
Which gets me to my actual point.
EDIT: Not just that ice cream clearly harmful or healthy, or that hexamethonium bromide's harms were or weren't known, or Dr. Togias was or wasn't responsible for Mrs. Roche's death, or 1I/‘Oumuamua is or isn't a comet, or carbons-sulfur-hydrogen or LK99 superconductors work or don't work. It's not even that we don't know about these things, or would struggle harshly to find them. I can give answers, to some small extent and with little confidence.
It's that you shouldn't or can't treat these massive systems as much more earnestly engaged in finding those answers than some rando online, and you shouldn't trust that much, either.
(For the record, probably not great or bad barring diabetes and the numbers are a selection effect, dangerous but undocumented, not really but should have tried harder, it's a rock, no, no.)/EDIT.
As a concrete example, I'll point to this paper. I have absolutely no idea if it's real or not. The entire field of covetics has an absolute ton of red flags, most overt in the sheer extent and variety of claimed benefits, but also the extent some papers look like someone just shook a can of 'nano' prefixes onto the summary to spice things up. On the other hand, while Argonne National Labs does that buzzword-sprinkling too... well, Argonne doing it is a pretty strong point in favor of it not being completely made up. For whatever it's worth, there is no wikipedia page, and Dan Garisto (and Scientific American) haven't found it worth examining.
But describing it as copper++ or aluminum++ is... if a bit of a exaggeration, not much of one. For a tl;dr, the proposed material trades off some additional manufacturing complexity (and ultimate bend radius) against vastly improved hardness, flexural strength, corrosion resistance, heat- and electrical- conductivity, even some weird things like capacitance. There are few fields using these materials where this would not have significant benefits.
If real.
Even if 'real', to any meaningful extent, it may still not be useful: there's a lot of manufacturing constraints, and the very traits that make it impressive-sounding may make it too annoying to work with. Great conductivity is a lot harder to use if the material can not be reasonably drawn as wire, for example. Excellent corrosion resistance doesn't help if it's tied to vibration microfractures, as early titanium development discovered.
But even before those considerations, there's a bigger problem that I'm not sure I can trust any of this more than some random youtuber mixing up the stuff. The literature has a lot of conflicting claims, which might be a process matter and might be more serious fucking around; the real-world progress of the lab supposedly doing the most with the stuff (maybe holding the patent?) literally involves a RICO suit. Weird behaviors like that are common-place in scientific and industrial developments that end up working out! They're also a lot of skulls.
In an ideal world, I could feed the academic literature into a big spreadsheet, average things out, and get a nice number. In this one, I can get a number; I'm not sure it wouldn't look like this.
And this is a case that matters, in the way a lot of science really matters. You could, as an individual or small business -- pending licensing agreements -- make or purchase a batch of this stuff, today, and implement it, perhaps with a sizable amount of trial and error, and if it were real, find significant benefit.
Would you want to make that bet? Because in a revealed preferences sense, no one has yet. And while every business decision is a risk, there's reasons this risk seems undesirable, despite hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars worth of past efforts supposedly promoting public understanding.
What happens if someone does? I'm not sure even successes would be well-documented, but the academic disinterest in negative replication, even from fellow researchers, is well-known. I don't expect it would be taken any better from industry randos, were tired businesses in a huge rush to document their failures. Would even moderate success be something that could be meaningfully presented through academic means? How much could any mean, if an author or publisher can choose to drop any detail they want from discussion and still be taken seriously long after?
Or is this the sorta sphere where magics, in both the optimistic and pejorative sense, just float forever slightly out-of-reach?
gattsuru
1yr ago
... I'd be interested to see what sort of 'wane' would fit your expectations, even if the culture war would still remain in a form, that's anywhere short of modern conservativism (and anything drawn as close to it) being smothered out completely.
One of my big frustrations is that for all people might say that this stuff isn't as bad or is 'only' as bad as McCarthyism, McCarthyism lasted less than a decade, and it very much had the seeds of its own destruction within it. We're coming up on fifteen for the most obvious start date of this particular cycle.
gattsuru
8mo ago
gattsuru
2d ago
The specific law here holds that a "commercial entity" (some carveouts for Google) that serves material on the internet "more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors" must use either commercial or government identification of age, or be subject to fines up to 10k USD per day plus 250k if a minor sees it. There's pretty widespread potential to interfere or discourage adult-to-adult speech that is only obscene to minors, or even some speech that isn't obscene at all so long as it comes from one of these companies.
There's also a compelled speech problem in the original bill, 14-point font inclusion of a substance addiction help line level. This is currently blocked, though it had a weird period where that block was under an administrative stay for nearly six months.
(Revealing the name behind an anonymous account of public note is not “doxxing,” which is an often-gendered form of online harassment that reveals private information — like an address or phone number — about a person without consent and with malicious intent.)
gattsuru
1yr ago
There were a lot of very young children killed, along with adults, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, including some photos that were released and I'm not linking to that were baby-sized bodies that had been both burned and their heads removed. This was initially reported as 40 babies decapitated, but it's likely that this was a conflation of different ages of children, and different causes of death; given the total population of the Kibbutz it's very unlikely that there were 40 <3-year-old infants there.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Today's scheduled drama revolves around the last-minute efforts to pass a continuing resolution funding the government for 45-days, with Congress coming in on a weekend. There's a lot of complex politics going on, between a right-wing faction that seems as interested in drama as day to day governance, Democratic interests in more expansionist efforts, the matters of Ukraine, and some politicians not being present due to COVID or death. With a bill getting through the House on widely-bipartisan efforts (with 90 Republicans and only 1 Democratic Representative voting no), some Republicans are pondering whether this will be seen as an admission of weakness. The current one's a fairly far cry from the much more significant cuts that previously faced both Democratic . That's fairly standard politics, though.
Instead, we have something hilarious:
(Bowman later voted for the bill.)
There's obvious comparisons to Other High-Profile Incidents though they're pretty inapt; as funny as Bowman photoshopped into the Lectern Thief's or Qanon Shaman's faces is, the lack of trespassing does matter. Between this, Santos pretending he's a whole lot more interesting than he was, The Squad playing with edgy racism, and Boebert giving an inexpert handjob during the showing of Beetlejuice, all we need now is a pregnancy and a Congressman buying shitty alcohol with a fake id to complete the whole high school bad decisions spread. To really complete the farce and the metaphor, Bowman's background includes some time spent as work at a school that would suspend or expel people for this. Bowman's claim to have confused an alarm system and a door release is not especially likely, but it's enough of a fig leaf that I'll be surprised if the House GOP's resolution to expel him goes anywhere, let alone the potential charges for falsely pulling a fire alarm in DC. Bowman's district is 84% Democratic, so it'd not mean anything even if he were to voluntarily resign, and it's not like he's Menendez.
Maybe he'll end up with a token fine? I'd be surprised.
Which doesn't matter, but eventually you run into the "that's how escalation works" bit.
FOSS and The XZ Problem
A critical vulnerability (CVE-2024-3094) was discovered in the XZ Utils library on March 29th, 2024. This severe flaw allows attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code on affected systems, earning it the highest possible score (10) on both the CVSS 3.1 and CVSS 4.0 scoring systems due to its immediate impact and wide scope.
The exploit would allow remote code execution as root in a wide majority of systemd-based Linux (and Mac OSX, thanks homebrew!) machines. There's some reasonable complaints that some CVE ratings are prone to inflation, but this has absolutely earned a 10/10, would not recommend. Thankfully, this was caught before the full exploit made it to many fixed release Linux distros, and most rolling-release distros either would not have updated so quickly or would not yet be vulnerable (and, presumably, will be updating to fixed versions of XZ quickly), with the exception of a handful of rarely-used Debian options. Uh, for the stuff that's been caught so far.
Summary and FAQ, for the more technically minded reader, the NIST CVE is here, background of initial discovery at here.
Ok, most of us who'd care remember Heartbleed. What's different here?
In this case, the exploit was near-certainly introduced intentionally by a co-maintainer of the library XZ Utils, by smuggling code into a binary test file, months apart from adding calls to execute that test file from live environments, and then working to hide any evidence. The combination of complexity in the attack (requiring fairly deep knowledge of a wide variety of Linux internals) and bizarreness of exploit steps (his FOSS history is sprinkled with a replacing safe functions with their unsafe precursors, or adding loose periods in cmake files) leaves nearly zero chance that this is unintentional, and the guy has since disappeared. He was boosted into co-maintainership only recently, and only after the original maintainer was pressured to pick him up by a strangely large barrage of very picky users. The author even pushed to have these updates shoved into Fedora early.
Most mainstream technical advisories aren't outright calling this a nation-state actor, but The Grugq is pretty willing to describe whoever did it as an 'intelligence agency', whether government or private, and with cause. Both the amount of effort and time put into this attack is vast, and the scope of vulnerability it produced extreme -- though this might be the 'cope' answer, since an individual or small-private-group running this level of complex attack is even more disturbing. It's paranoid to start wondering how much of the discussion aimed encouraging XZ's maintainer to take on the bad actor here as a co-maintainer, but as people are having more and more trouble finding evidence of their existence since, it might not be paranoid enough.
There's a lot of potential takeaways:
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The Many Eyes theory of software development worked. This was an incredibly subtle attack that few developers would have been able to catch, by an adversary willing to put years into developing trust and sneaking exploit in piecemeal.
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Except it was caught because a Microsoft (Postgres!) developer, without looking at the code, noticed a performance impact. Shit.
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This attack heavily exploited access through the FOSS community: the author was able to join sight-unseen through a year of purely digital communications, and the 'business decision' of co-maintainership came through a lot of pressure from randos or anons.
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Except that's something that can happen in corporate or government environments, too. There are places where every prospective employee gets a full background check and a free prostate exam, but they're the outlier even for dotmil spheres. Many employers are having trouble verifying that prospective recruits can even code, and most tech companies openly welcome recent immigrants or international workers that would be hard to investigate at best. Maybe they would have recognized that the guy with a stereotypical Indian name didn't talk like a native Indian, but I wouldn't bet on even that. And then there's just the stupid stuff that doesn't have to involve employees at all.
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The attack space is big, and probably bigger than it needs to be. The old school of thought was that you'd only 'really' need to do a serious security audit of services actually being exposed, and perhaps some specialty stuff like firewall software, but people are going to be spending months looking for weird calls in any software run in privileged modes. One of many
boneheadedcontroversial bits of systemd was the increased reliance on outside libraries compared to precursors like SysV Init. While some people do pass tar.xz around, XZ's main use in systemd seems to be related to loading replacement keys or VMs, and it's not quite clear exactly why that's something that needs to be baked into systemd directly. -
But a compression library seems just after cryptographic libraries are a reasonable thing to not roll your own, and even if this particular use for this particular library might have been avoidable, you're probably not going to be able to trim that much out, and you might not even be able to trim this.
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There's a lot of this that seems like the chickens coming home to roost for bad practices in FOSS development: random test binary blobs ending up on user systems, build systems that either fail-silently on hard-to-notice errors or spam so much random text no one looks at it, building from tarballs, so on.
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But getting rid of bad or lazy dev practices seems one of those things that's just not gonna happen.
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The attacker was able to get a lot of trust so quickly because significant part of modern digital infrastructure depended on a library no one cared about. The various requests for XZ updates and co-maintainer permissions look so bizarre because in a library that does one small thing very well, it's quite possible only attackers cared. 7Zip is everywhere in the Windows world, but even a lot of IT people don't know who makes it (Igor Patlov?).
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But there's a lot of these dependencies, and it's not clear that level of trust was necessary -- quite a lot of maintainers wouldn't have caught this sort of indirect attack, and no small part of the exploit depended on behavior introduced to libraries that were 'well'-maintained. Detecting novel attacks at all is a messy field at best, and this sort of distributed attack might not be possible to detect at the library level even in theory.
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And there's far more varied attack spaces available than just waiting for a lead dev to burn out. I'm a big fan of pointing out how much cash Google is willing to throw around for a more visible sort of ownage of Mozilla and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but the full breadth of the FOSS world runs on a shoestring budget for how much of the world depends on it working and working well. In theory, reputation is supposed to cover the gap, and a dev with a great GitHub commit history can name their price. In practice, the previous maintainer of XZ was working on XZ for Java, and you haven't heard of Lasse Collin (and may not even recognize xz as a file extension!).
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((For culture war bonus points, I can think of a way to excise original maintainers so hard that their co-maintainers have their employment threatened.))
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There's been calls for some sort of big-business-sponsored security audits, and as annoying as the politics of that get, there's a not-unreasonable point that they should really want to do that. This particular exploit had some code to stop it from running on Google servers (maybe to slow recognition?), but there's a ton of big businesses that would have been in deep shit had it not been recognized. "If everyone's responsible, no one is", but neither the SEC nor ransomware devs care if you're responsible.
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But the punchline to the Google's funding of various FOSS (or not-quite-F-or-O, like RaspberryPi) groups is that even the best-funded groups aren't doing that hot, for even the most trivial problem. Canonical is one of the better-funded groups, and it's gotten them into a variety of places (default for WSL!) and they can't bother to maintain manual review for new Snaps despite years of hilariously bad malware.
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But it's not clear that it's reasonable or possible to actually audit the critical stuff; it's easier to write code than to seriously audit it, and we're not just a little shy on audit capabilities, but orders of magnitude too low.
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It's unlikely this is the first time something like this has happened. TheGrugq is professionally paranoid and notes that this looks like bad luck, and that strikes me more as cautious than pessimistic.
My objection has never been your tone. And while I'll object to individual factual claims, they're things that can be discussed. My objection has long been that your oppressed means nothing and everything. So let's be very explicit:
And from my perspective, all of you saying "Yes, we are oppressed because (hypothetical, hypothetical, vaguely related anecdote)" are redefining "oppression" to mean "Elections don't always go the way I want and laws I don't like sometimes get passed."
Do you think this is the claim? Do you think that is what motivates people like FCfromSSC, or what motivates my concerns?
Like, last time I tried this you accused me of gish-galloping, so this is more for everybody else, but just to be clear exactly what the scope we're talking about:
You will still be able to proclaim your right wing views in public.
No, I can't. Trivially, we're here because the last forum started shutting down random posters, and the place before that our presence was so severe that it got someone's name in the New York Times (to everyone's surprise as a smear piece) and they had a mental breakdown. Just as trivially, Damore predated your post. FCFromSSC has mentioned getting canceled by a friend over good faith disagreements, I've talked about how I've made significant sacrifices in my career and social and romantic life to reduce the threat and still am subject to it.
My go to example right now is the guy who built Modded Minecraft's very foundations in Forge getting canceled so hard that, when he resisted, his fellow project leads had their employers invoked as part of the ultimatum. Actually true statements of law get pulled from major social media, when offered by randos with tiny followings. Rittenhouse couldn't use GoFundMe, and when people did use a different vendor to donate, that company got hacked, and some of them got fired for <30 USD donations -- the organization that doxxed them is affiliated with Harvard and no one cares. VCDL has e-mail providers and YouTube dropping them without explanation or even reference to a broken rule, ARFCOM got blammed off GoDaddy without notice, so on.
But there's not snipers waiting to make my head Just Do That should I say the wrong words, nor am I required by law to strap on a voice-activated bomb collar before going outdoors; sometimes people even resist these attacks successfully (or at least the sort of 'success' that throws away their futures in exchange for symbolic victories and the grifter circuits). Hell, it's not even as bad as that other country declaring martial law emergency powers, confiscating property, which you were "not sure I agree it's "oppression" but it's fucked."
You will not be living in a leftist authoritarian state with "struggle sessions" forcing you to say you love Big Brother.
Those DEI sessions I mentioned last time in that post you didn't find impressive? They're back! Or more accurately never really went away. And state attempts to block them have been blocked in turn. "Diversity statements" are de jour in academia. Gallup considers it a failure than 'only' 41% of managers and 42% of employees have received DEI/racial justice training. While I'm too old for it to be a concern personally, schools have not only formalized official support for protesting ("no official repercussions" if the students don't play along, just an official assignment asking them to explain why they complied).
Do you need more examples? Because it's kinda awkward to dance around the ones I've experienced directly outside of these domains without doxing myself, but I can continue.
Right wing media and right wing politicians will still have power and influence. Trump will not be the last Republican president.
yyyyaaaaayyy.
There will still be religion and people who say homosexuality is a sin and trans people bad (and teach it to their children, who are not taken away from them).
The closest thing we've had to a slowdown here is Newsom vetoing a rule requiring judges to consider it for custody hearings; it's still policy. Demkovich was overturned, but the dissent pointed out that the 9th Circuit had case law going the other direction, and it's not like it's a one-off.
It's not room temperature, fair.
The left will not be murdering political enemies with impunity...
Modulo Matthew Dolloff, sure. And there's some rough spots for people who tried and failed: we still don't even know what happened to Grosskruetz's concealed carry permit, and obviously he's never been and never going to be tried for either the unlawful carry nor threatening a teenager, in contrast to Dominick Black. And then there's the places where the shooters or the shot are a little more complicated to discuss.
But it's not that many people getting shot! Sometimes they have to post bail! Hell, Finicum wouldn't even be that sympathetic, were it not for the hilariously bad behavior of federal law enforcement and the long toleration of many occupations efforts. So it's not Oppression.
There will probably still be problems with race and crime.
... this one didn't even make sense contemporaneously. Yes, and? That the progressive tribe neither can fix these problems, and benefits from motioning around them, is one of FCFromSSC's positions.
And for bonus points:
A combination of the teacher's union and local collaborators called in the FBI over school board meetings. Individual people have called in the EEOC over a hat. The DoJ's OCR is investigating a college for using gendered bathrooms and abolishing a diversity program, feds and fed courts for mask mandates, so on. One group of teachers alleged did not report bullies to local administrators, nor punish them themselves, so that they could use the 'ignored' bad actions as part of a DoE complaint to bring the feds down harder on violations of leftist norms.
The ATF is in the middle of an aggressive crackdown on FFLs and home gunsmithing, the EPA fights over drainage ditches, the ADA has brought a small army of 'testers' that will happily demand the rebuild of services they never intend to buy, people are regularly asking the feds to treat GOP governors offering bus or plane rides to undocumented immigrants like kidnapping. And these are just the serious ones, where there's investigations and publicity and lawsuits and media coverage. It's worse in Blue Tribe areas, but you couldn't run from this stuff a decade ago (literally, in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop).
Which, hey, these are just policy disagreements! Sometimes ones that the Blue Tribe doesn't even immediately win! No one's getting shot in the face, it's not jazzhands oppression, at least by the pre-Civil War slavery one, if less so by the modern Harvard one.
But are these things happening? Can you imagine why people might think of them as something more than just "laws I don't like sometimes get passed"? Can you imagine why, when you say:
I assert, essentially, that your Doomer "We have lost and Red Tribe will no longer have rights" is absolutely, 100% wrong and will continue to be proven wrong.
it's an absolute non sequitor from the post you were responding to, and absolutely nonsensical as a position that everyone must wait for before they are allowed to respond or complain or recognize a pattern?
... how did that post start again?
Here's a wager. Obviously if I'm wrong, you'll never be able to collect, but anyway.
Emphasis added.
You could meaningfully argue if some of these things aren't true. I'd love to hear it! As I frequently point out at the end of these rants, I'm not an accelerationist, I'd love to hear how they're wrong, and part of my frustration here is that FCFromSSC (or Hradzka on twitter) have given far better version of that than you have. You can point out that it's not as bad as prebellum era slavery or the 1940s South (correctly!), or the treatment of gay men in the 1900s, or (much more arguably) of communists in the McCarthy era.
You can not correctly argue, short of disproving them, that these are "(hypothetical, hypothetical, vaguely related anecdote)".
At least 31 people were killed Sunday morning in southern Gaza, according to the Strip’s Health Ministry, when Israeli troops opened fire on crowds making their way to collect aid from a new distribution mechanism backed by Israel and the United States that has been marred by chaos and violence since it began operating last week. More than 170 others were wounded Sunday in the Rafah shooting, officials said, marking the deadliest incident yet as Palestinians desperately scramble for food despite the danger.
Other organizations have given numbers into the 50+ fatality range. This is pretty much the nightmare scenario for the Trump takeover of the aid program: removing Palestinian or UNRWA control of incoming aid prevents diversion or theft, but a single security failure or panicked guard could be both a political and humanitarian nightmare, and because the organization managing the aid deliveries is tied to US sources, it'd be a worldwide political and humanitarian nightmare.
It's also not clear it's actually happened.
The IDF and GHF have denied it, which, well, they would, wouldn't they? But there's no video of the event, despite the large crowds that must have been present. The Israelis, meanwhile, have released video of gunmen firing on crowds not far from the aid distribution site in question, and said gunmen at least aren't wearing uniforms for the IDF or GHF or GHF-security, and Hamas has been making pretty loud noises about punishing Palestinians who cooperate with the GHF program. Fog of war makes things hard, and trust is difficult in a situation like this, but it's enough that a lot of headlines in even Arabic-focused orgs have switched to the passive voice.
A man threw an incendiary device at an event organized by a Jewish group at a Colorado pedestrian mall to call for the release of hostages in Gaza, authorities said. At least eight people were hurt before a suspect was arrested in what officials called a targeted attack. Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, of El Paso County, Colorado, threw Molotov cocktails and yelled “Free Palestine” before he was taken into custody, police said, citing witness accounts of the attack. Two victims were airlifted for treatment at a burn unit, officials said.
With eight people, all older than fifty and some over eighty, facing serious burns, it'll be a minor miracle if there are no fatalities. 'We may never know the motive' and some CNN apologetics (why is McCabe anywhere near a camera?) or CBS NBC gymnastics aside, the alleged perp has since been charged pretty harshly and has received as high a bail as Colorado meaningfully goes, and the state governor has condemned the attack (he's running!). The feds have another bit or two at the apple if needed, and absolutely would love to chew this guy and spit him out.
There's some easy if morbid memes, here, but I don't expect this guy to get quite as much a Western fandom as, say, Luigi. I'm gonna make a wild ass guess and assume that the shirtless molotov-tosser falls pretty deep into the Hradzka garbage person scale. It's hard to overstate how radicalizing it's going to be as an example, though. The alleged perpetrator was a visa overstay from Egypt who'd gotten work authorization and an asylum claim in under Biden; the victims had been making (kinda goofy) protests over the October 7 hostages for over a year and were hit directly outside of the county courthouse.
We don't know whether he heard 'about' the GHF aid massacre. Again, garbage person, for all we know today, the man was lashing out about 'zionists' because the radio waves in his molars thought it was the best way to help free gerbils. But I think there's some components worth spelling out:
- Staying strapped is going to become more of a byword for several political groups. The theoretical question of "If he wasn't carrying a gun" stopped being theoretical over year ago, now. There's not been a serious attack like this on a Pride parade yet, and I'm still evaluating whether I'm going to the strap-prohibited local one (and, tbf, whether I can tolerate that level of Mama Mia soundtrack); I can't advocate anyone legally able to CCW to go to a Gaza-focused protest without CCW.
- The consequences of staying strapped is very likely going to become front-page news in the next year. And it's not going to be a great situation for the guys who starts something, but it's also not going to be a great situation for the guy who ends that something. Dolloff was Denver, but it's not hard to consider how the culture war lines would fall on a remotely unclear shoot.
- ... but probably not in the places where it's most important for this specific attack. Colorado's carry laws are complicated and in flux, but Boulder, specifically has been very aggressive and basically ban carry in public spaces. Most other places where a lot of the
nuttieststrongest pro-Palestinian voices congregate are pretty similar in effect, if not in text. You'd think that would be a violation of Bruen? Yeah, but that's a matter for my other post today on Snope. That's not going to stop everyone, but it's going to get a lot of the people who might be test cases to just to go elsewhere... - ... while the unarmed remain.
gattsuru
8mo ago
Wise To The World
Ohio Capital Journal reports:
Westerville City Schools Board of Education voted 4-0 last week to end a religious release time policy that allowed LifeWise Academy to take public school students out of class to conduct Bible instruction during school hours. [...]
In Ohio, school districts may choose to allow students to earn up to two high school credits, during non-'core' education school hours, subject to a number of limitations such as on funding (solely private) and parental consent (written).
Why are they popular? My impression from what I've been able to gather of their curricula -- admittedly, the full contents of which they play pretty close to the chest -- is more Lutheran Sunday School than anything Hellfire Baptist. I'm not hugely tied into the fundie religious parents, but what contacts I do have, these programs are seen as offering a good compromise. Unlike homeschooling, the student is still getting core curricula and socialization with the general public (uh, for better or worse). Unlike the school's non-core programs, there's some integration with religious processes. Why not just do those things outside of school hours? The growth of after-school extracurriculars and increased reliance on those successes for college acceptance or scholarships have made 'traditional' afternoon or weekends religious programs harder and harder to maintain, while the reduced presence of religious programs elsewhere has made transportation overhead more costly.
What were the big arguments against these policies? Parents Against LifeWise has a more varied set of issues on their web page, for those who want a (very) deep dive. At least from my read, the vast majority of concerns are hypotheticals and/or trivialities, but perhaps a more critical eye will pick up something I've missed. OCJ offers:
“I was raised to know that religious teaching belongs in the home, at the church, with your friends, with your family, and those various people that believe the way you do,” said Dr. Allison Baer, an Associate Professor at the University of Findlay, and mother of Center for Christian Virtue President Aaron Baer. “If this program, and this teaching, is so vital to their Christian life, why isn’t it offered after school, which would help working parents with free after school child care?”
“Westerville City Schools preaches diversity, equity and inclusion. But diversity, equity, and inclusion does not call for every human being to be a Christian,” said Luke Bauman, a Westerville resident. “It is the goal of LifeWise, tied closely with Project 2025, to dismantle public education from the inside out.” [...]
LifeWise is a gold level sponsor of the Essential Summit, a two-day conference organized by religious lobbying organization the Center for Christian Virtue, who’ve helped craft school choice laws and anti-trans bills in Ohio. CCV is listed as a hate group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center [ed: good luck figuring out why?]. The keynote speaker of the CCV summit was Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts.
Which... seems more to cut to the quick, here. Opponents are not driven by the terror of a slightly disrupted school schedule, or a flyer mentioning a religious organization being printed on a school printer. They're appalled that broad-scale religious organizations exist in the public square, and have defenders. And a purple town in a purple-leaning-red state agreed.
Well, is this just a one-off? Each school board covers a relatively small area, so it's not that weird if some random people did something kinda meh.
The Huron City School Board decided in a majority vote to end their released time policy on Aug. 20 this year. Prior to them, the Vermillion Board of Education also voted on June 29 against starting their own program. Bowling Green City Schools, Johnson-Monroe City Schools, Gahanna-Jefferson City Schools, and Sylvania City Schools have also come out against the released time policy.
There's some !!fun!! legal discussion about how this sort of policy change based on a fig leaf of organizational difficulty on top of overt disquiet with religious belief -- there's a certain comparison to the animus in Cleburne that I don't think either side of this debate would find particularly complimentary. But in practice school boards outside of Florida have pretty free reign to pick and choose supported programs, and courts can and will treat that fig leaf as if it were substantial when they want.
There's a bill in the state house requiring schools to permit released time programs, but it's unlikely to go anywhere and poorly written enough that it has no enforcement mechanism against school boards that defy it or find 'secular' cause to ignore it. And, again, courts can and will treat that fig leaf as if it were substantial when they want.
What sorta solutions might come up, instead?
ProPublica [bleh] reports:
Following Hurricane Katrina and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, some federal taxpayer dollars went toward repairing and improving private K-12 schools in multiple states. Churches that operate schools often receive government funding for the social services that they offer; some orthodox Jewish schools in New York have relied on significant financial support from the city, The New York Times has found. But national experts on education funding emphasized that what Ohio is doing is categorically different.
“This is new, dangerous ground, funding new voucher schools,” said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center and the author of a new book on the history of billionaire-led voucher efforts. For decades, churches have relied on conservative philanthropy to be able to build their schools, Cowen said, or they’ve held fundraising drives or asked their diocese for help.)
The Ohio One-Time Strategic Community Investment Fund, a widely available fund of the type that Trinity Lutheran expressly prohibits governments from blocking out religious organizations. You might make one of many arguments that this is a graft (why is the dayton airshow getting state grants?). Opponents might argue that puts an increasing wide and variety of education funding outside of the domain of electoral control (uh, admittedly with a little bit of hypocrisy).
What did you think "teacher's unions are unambiguously and emphatically against the Republican Party" meant? Vibes? Papers?
I Told You Those Stories, So I Could Tell This One
[way more]
Come for the Gender Unicorn; stay for the hilarious claim that Donald Trump would simultaneously call all undocumented immigrants animals but not use the word 'illegal immigrant'. Okay, that's trite, and there are some distinctions, here. Lifewise operated in school hours with solely private funding; the New Haven Social Justice Academy program operated during the summer with at least some of public funding. Lifewise is a religious organization, the Social Justice Academy is... well some of these programs get a little on the nose with the extent that they're replacements for religion, but afaict the New Haven Program here avoids direct reference to the topic except to call George Floyd an austere religious scholar mentor.
There's a lot of snark to be made, here, but there's also a more serious point.
A complete rando talking about Lifewise offers :
"Whether Lifewise is a good program or a secretly evil program with a long term goal of eroding the public school system and the separation of church and state, the way that it has emboldened the Christofascists in my town to speak without a hint of self awareness makes me extremely wary of my neighbors (and one of them... lives on my street.)"
The DailyWire's piece quotes a complete rando "Director of Outreach" from an aligned political group :
“This summer program should have been advertised as an indoctrination camp where ideologues who spell the word ‘women’ with an x feed students propaganda about defunding the police, transgenderism, and oppression."
These programs all say a lot about fragmentation. I'm writing about them -- I'm reading about them -- because people want each and every one from the other team removed. Deleted. Unalived in minecraft lava, if you will. The possibility that someone might take the wrong choice, or defend the possibility of taking the wrong choice, is enough.
Happy Halloween, everyone!
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm not sure that Israel wants or would prefer 'genteel' ethnic cleansing, even ignoring the US and EU reactions to such a thing. Some of the individual settler-groups, sure, but from the IDF's perspective it's kinda a white elephant. And as bad as the issue of the Gazan Strip is today, at least the IDF wasn't considering a war with Egypt every time a few hitch-hikers get kidnapped.
Of course, on the flip side, I don't think Egypt wants to handle just the civilians who want to leave the Strip, or just the civilians for only a few months, and is willing to threaten to mass ship them to the EU even if Israel could credibly commit, and Israel can't credibly commit. So it doesn't really matter.
On the gripping hand, there were a lot of options on the table that involved ground forces (or prolonged active bombing campaigns), without permanently taking the Gaza Strip, but I'm not sure the delays -- especially in when combined with unsearch humanitarian aid -- are compatible with them. Maybe Biden's just trying to buy time before those more energetic efforts start, either to try to line up some Muslim custodian government or for hostage negotiation or both, but a lot of stuff coming from the White House right now seem like they're just pivoting really hard to the Squad alignment.
Which... boots on the ground in the Gazan Strip seems like a recipe for years of bloodbaths, so maybe that just works out? But there's a limit to the model of war as politics by other means. Trivially, 'just barrier down Hamas and lob a bomb in there when you spot someone with a big hat' was the pre-2023 Likud philosophy, and it doesn't seem like there's some obvious way to prevent a re-occurrence of 10/7 or some similar category of catastrophe. Yes, obviously the intel failures and work permit program and some imports will be getting a lot of scrutiny, but that's a really fancy way of saying 'try again harder' that isn't likely to be perfect for forty years.
And even if you can persuade Netanyahu to make the 'right' decision today, there's little or no reason to suspect that he'll be in charge forever: the opposing coalition is in a double-digit lead right now, and not especially dovish right now. If you persuade them without persuading the people voting for them, they'll just get replaced in turn. And if you could persuade the broader populace, you wouldn't need to set up a game of musical chairs for the political leadership.
gattsuru
9mo ago
Oof. That's a mess.
While it (and even the publicity) might not completely kill this guy's career, it definitely chops a lot of potential off it. There's some civilian uses for the sorta skills the software parts of that career field do, and some cybersecurity shops won't really care, but quite a lot of them either depend on background checks or lower levels of clearance that are gonna red flag this. Even if he didn't plan on staying in the DoD, having a security clearance before leaving can be worth a lot of salary.
(LinkedIn points to a higher education nonprofit, which... works, I guess, though depending on exactly where it falls in 'higher ed' would raise different concerns if he really were a threat. Dunno if it's more or less of a Google Problem than having your real name tied to the other sort of 1000-year-old dragon.)
And while not the most central case of where these definitions break down, and squicks me a bit (especially "intent to continue doing so" as he stops being a teenager, though not being able to read the complaint leaves me some concern for how accurately that's being repeated), it's still the sort of thing that also gets played at Cannes or put into a school library when there's a sufficient bow slapped on top. Law is filled with these sorta graduations, but if you wanted a similar level of 'officially banned, unofficially tolerated or sometimes feted' the first place to come to mind would be marijuana legalization, which... hasn't worked out great.
It's not clear whether it's illegal in the strict formalist sense. Ashcroft v Free Speech is usually what people point to as suggesting that obviously fictional works can't be generally prohibited, but that opinion allowed such speech to be restricted under the rules around obscenity, and Congress did do that. While that definition is vague (imo badly so) and counterproductive (imo badly so), modern technical advances have made Rehnquist's dissent much more persuasive at the same time that SCOTUS's makeup is more skeptical of the ACLU takes. From a legal realist perspective? It's a clusterfuck to determine if any one piece has 'redeeming value' (though a majority of furry porn is straight-up porn that would directly fail by honest tests, and others by close-enough checks), whether it offends community sensibilities, whether the ways it does offend community sensibilities are actually the sort the courts unofficially overlook because it's a proxy for 'animus', what the age of characters even are (is this goat the probably-older-than-universe-but-woefully-immature Asriel from Undertale, the unknown-aged-but-probably-late-high-schoolish Ralsei from Deltarune, an aged-down version of either, an aged up version of either, or an Original Character Donut Steel?), yada yada. Prosecutors generally don't want to deal with it, but they have on rare occasions with especially clear cases.
On the other hand, this isn't criminal prosecution: especially this level of higher-tier security clearance. There's a reason you can tell who's been through that level of interview from those who've just heard about it by the extent they flinch at certain questions. For all the official guidelines are about really overt behavior showing sympathy to foreign governments, illegal behaviors, or blackmailable targets, the practical guidelines are looking for broader understandings of strong impulse control and good judgement, pretty vaguely defined. If playing War Thunder is an unacceptable security risk -- and I think it's pretty persuasive that it is -- it's not like this is that unreasonable.
On the gripping hand, the extent the underlying laws and definitions are a mess and largely unconfrontable is gonna keep making the paradoxes more present, both here and in cases with more serious consequences. I get that critics of the law are (understandably!) looking for cases with perfectly sympathetic defendants and especially clear legal processes, both for normal legal tactics and because a decent number of the 'it's ephibophilia' people end up taking off the mask, but in practice there's been thirty years of establishing a pretty harsh new social norm.
((On the other gripping hand, it's quite possible we'll seriously confront those central cases where the definitions completely break down and decide that's because we do need to crank up enforcement of stricter social and legal norms. Totally fictional porn by people who are just working through their own missed opportunities in their youth still have the Kabier problem, and there's a lot more evidence in favor of even sometimes-above-age-of-consent sexualization being either risky or prone to abuse.))
gattsuru
2yr ago
And, from a deeper level, it's not hard to miss some writing on the wall for the broader concept. StableDiffusion 2.0 has released a few weeks ago, closely followed by 2.1, with some nice new features and also a couple somewhat noticable subtractions: the new tokenizer has removed tags related to celebrities and almost all living or recently-living artists, along with anything that triggered the NSFW filter. The upcoming StableDiffusion 3.0 plans to allow a manual opt-out for artists from the training side.
The stated reasons for these changes are condensed here, but the less overt reason is probably public controversy and things like this. I reallllllly don't want to get into the legal questions of the state actor doctrine, but I would like to suggest that there's legal spaces around this discussion that might be weighing heavily on his mind..
Now, in theory, there's some technical advantages to this approach, not just the bizarre legal ones. Furry Diffusion trainers have already found many problems in tuning 1.x-variants due to the often-overloaded nature of common terms, and the broad concept of encouraging models more specifically focused for the interests and desires of specific people makes a good deal more sense than the limits and flaws of post-generation filtering.
But in turn, that personally-optimized tuning is hard and energy-intensive, and currently not available for a lot of people, even as GPU prices have dropped a bit.
Or it might be reasonable to argue that these excluded spaces not that important, were we not also having thousands of culture war battles to the teeth over everything else remotely related to sex, or spending tremendous amounts of (tbf, unuseful) attention on celebrities, or near-worshipping some of the excluded artists. And it's hard to see why all three are uniquely reasonable to set-aside.
And accepting these limitations at the OpenAI initial training level risks anyone trying to uncollar a locally-tuned version being stigmatized and viewed as interested solely in the very bad acts that OpenAI fears being tarred with themselves. That Eshoo letter, after all, is just as pissed about locally-generated 'bad' art as that made on a server.
Perhaps coincidentally, attempts to fund a porn-friendly version just got kicked off Kickstarter, on the tail end of this rather vague post.
I'm somewhat skeptical that the only pressures being applied are the public ones.
I'm actually struggling to think of anti-racist slurs? "Colonizer?" Maybe someone says that and right-wingers feel unwanted, or doxxing threats make them feel unsafe. It's also possible that the community enters a purity spiral and implodes. But this is rare, because we're talking about boring hobby groups, not activists.
I'm... not sure this is a good model. This is from a little over a year ago, and it's not exactly slowed down.
Since, the RPGNet forum has a new header, proudly informing everyone that "With abortion and birth control rights threatened both around the world and particularly in the United States, RPGnet believes that reproductive rights are human rights. We're committed to that, and will sanction posts supporting anti-human-rights positions." A quick look through the rules forum shows examples like this. The person who ran a Minecraft server I contributed personalized code for wrote, casually, about how proud they were to have personally punched a Prop 8 funder. I've got a lot of sympathy for the Quilt side of that culture war, but it's not like it's hard to find loads of conversations in the Quilt Discord hunting for even a sniff of 'right-wing' alignment and shutting down conversations or people they see as doing so. There's been a 'fun' battle in a STEM outreach organization I volunteer for, less about the LGBT and pronouns pins (fine), and more about any team where the mentors show too much discomfort with them (understandable if not great), and what needs to be done to move students (little paranoid) and resources (problem!) around that.
Now, people have a right to not be perfectly accepting and making everyone feel safe, competing access needs, yada yada. But it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and self-identifies as a duck.
But at a deeper level, I think the inability to even think of anti-racist slurs is... kinda showing a big blind spot. Even for that specific example! Karens (and their distaff Kevins), MAGAtards, so on, are all 'about' racism. Do you think "Nazi" is a real specific term describing an ideology, or a boo-light? How about "reactionary", whether on twitter or coming from the President of the United States? And that's ignoring the complex ones, like 'alt-right' or 'white supremacist/nationalist' (which sometimes actually means that, rarely even by self-identification, but just as often means 'somewhere to the right of President Obama in 2014).
And it's not like those are special. Outside of race, "gun nut" was reclaimed, but want to know a place where you can call people groomers on Twitter? These aren't slurs in the sense that a lot of the progressive movement cares, and I've had long debates with TraceWoodgrains about the bounds of it... but that's kinda the point.
The Death of Trust in Bipartisan Lawmaking
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is a 2023 law, driven by nearly a decade of cross-party and cross-tribe interests, best summarized by the intro to this 2018 Atlantic piece:
While a 1978 amendment to Title VII established pregnancy as a protected characteristic, the PWFA's congressional support saw it as too limited in scope and in what accommodations it could require businesses to hold.
Another point, however, dropped in mid-April:
This isn't necessarily new, or a surprise: some courts had already held that the 1978 Title VII amendment protected abortion as a pregnancy-related medical condition, albeit with the more restricted scope. There are good pragmatic or philosophical arguments in favor or against, either in regards to abortion specifically or as a law in general, and some !!fun!! questions about a possible that the EEOC's rule-making treats as purely theoretical. There are some, if not exactly strong, arguments that the text of the law requires it.
Several Republican congresscritters who voted for and cosponsored the bill promptly blasted this interpretation, swearing that they were sure and assured it wouldn't happen. Social conservatives, on the other hand, prompted sang I told you so.
Mattes and his organization do still exist, but haven't commented on the new regulation. They're not, it can be fairly readily assumed, in a huge hurry to partner with the ACLU on statute-writing or sponsor-wrangling any time soon.
Okay, well that's not a policy I actually care about, so it's at least kinda funny, and .
FFLs and How To Get Your Dog Shot By The ATF
The 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act had many components, but one of many that gun rights advocates pointed out at length as a matter of concern, even well before the law's language was fully concrete, was the redefinition of gun dealers and engaging in the business of firearms sales, from "principal objective of livelihood and profit" to "predominantly earn a profit". The ATF released its final rule on this new statutory definition in early April, shortly after shooting someone in the head while all their agents forgot their cameras at home, explicitly citing the BSCA's new language as cause.
Three guesses on how that went, and the first two don't count:
The only thing that the new rule explicitly does not consider to be "predominantly earn[ing] a profit" is if an individual is liquidating all or part of their owned firearms, without (ever?) purchasing new ones, and I wouldn't bet my pet's life on it. In some ways, it's kinda impressive: the final rule, as opposed to the original proposal, reacted to gunnie concerns about the underspecificity of one resale exception by explicitly removing firearms owned for personal protection from it. In some cases, it breaks from the text of the statute. Halbrook highlights a statutory exception that the ATF refines down to covers repair and customization.
I've written before about the same act smothering archery and hunter training programs at schools, and while this was eventually (and to my surprise) amended, that passed late enough to leave programs screwed over for last school year. We'll see how many schools are willing or able to bring them back.
All around me are familiar faces, Worn out places, worn out FACEs
The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act is a 1994 statute from the old days before backronyms were popularized outside of the military, and consisted of three major prohibitions:
It was considered the height of bipartisan compromise at a difficult time (and Bill Clinton's statescraft, in contrast to the then-expensive Assault Weapons Ban), and like many laws from that era, it reflects a draconian view of punishment. While a first nonviolent offense can 'only' result in a maximum of six months imprisonment and a 10k USD fine, these numbers scale rapidly for repeat offenses, and can be rapidly stacked, even in marginal cases, with other charges to boost the scope of a trial and the possible punishment.
Uh. Except you might notice a pattern in what direction both the successful and failed cases go, and what prongs of the FACE Act they cover. It's not that the feds never prosecute someone for clear violations of this law; they just do it by using an entirely different law that predated and does not scale, and accept plea bargains for the most minimal punishments. That disparity has been around for a while, even if it's only become more obvious with Jane's Revenge floating around.
It does not, as a matter of law, matter whether the FACEs is ever enforced against a specific political viewpoint. And from the view of the 'don't break the laws, fucko' or 'don't block access to public spaces' caucus, I've got little sympathy for protestors getting burned when they signed up for the frying pan. But if you sent a message back in time to the 1994 GOP and told them they were just repeating the 1988 18 USC 247, I doubt they'd have trumpeted it.
Joe Wilson and the Affordable Care Act
There's a number of famous controversies during the run-up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, along with some lesser-known ones. The extent trans-related healthcare would be covered and what expectations that invoked was a sleeper, while the question of "encouraged end-of-life" care rather famously got above the fold at length.
Joe Wilson is best-remembered, to the extent he's remembered at all, for one of the better-known ones. He shouted out "You lie" during the middle of a joint session of congress where then-President Obama disavowed that "our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants", a matter Republicans feared would be thrown.
To be fair to President Obama, he's (officially) been out of office for the better part of a decade. To be less fair to Biden, there's no statute changed about any of this in that whole timeframe, and Obama was using the future tense. Whatever Obama thought he was proposing, this is what his proposal got, and it's not like he's complaining.
Wilson received a reprimand for his outburst. There'd be some irony in him living long enough to crow about it, though he hasn't done so yet. And even if he did, being right is cold comfort for anyone other than the politicians.
One of These Things Is Not Like The Others
The Affordable Care Act, unlike the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act or Pregnant Workers Fairness Act or Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, was more the result of long negotiation rather than long negotiation and compromise between the parties. There are no Republican cosponsors or even congressional votes for the law to be betrayed, because there were no Republican congressional votes for the ACA at all; at most, there were some (long-booted) Blue Dogs.
Quite a large number of moderates, of one stripe or another, drew that as a particular failure. They could, we were told, have gotten more serious concessions; they could, we were told, have achieved their own separate goals. How much they were moderates or 'moderates' often said how much 'they' in the previous passages stood for the GOP or for that particular person's particular goals. During the second half of the Obama years, many of the particular goals side painted the Republicans as the Party of No; after, this obstinate unwillingness to give up a slice of the cake was drawn as both cause and effect of various Republican maladies, from poll numbers among young professionals to failure to integrate into the administrative class to the price of tea in China.
The PWFA and BSCA rulemakings and FACEs prosecutions come as the punchlines to those particularly jokes. No one's come away from any statute feeling the GOP has a better finger on the interests of the public, or was able to represent its people's interests better than the What's The Matter With Kansas asshole. Perhaps these laws are all cherry-picked, and every other major bipartisan statute had everyone walk away smiling, or the GOP betrayed the Democratic Party. Nor, given the speed that even matters as simple as dictionaries have turned to political ends, is there any way to promise that the next time would be different, or that even laws and statutes that conservatives badly want would be resistant. Indeed, the longest delay was the case where they compromised in no amount at all!
You still don't get that many tries to break trust, and it's expensive to rebuild.
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