Physics and Nano

Source: Brookings Institution

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Democracy, Existentialism, Fascism

Cate Cox and Brittany Watts: Their last names rhyme, but their circumstances couldn’t be more diametrically different from one another.

Cate Cox is a married suburban mother with two children. She previously lived in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, but due to her condition, she had to flee her state. A complication with her pregnancy put her life at risk and the possibility that she might not be able to conceive again if her pregnancy weren’t ended expeditiously through a procedure now outlawed in Texas.

Brittany Watts, an African American woman, had a stillborn, unfortunately, in the toilet. The fetus was found in the drain, and she was charged with abuse.

Mrs. Cox eventually left Texas for the procedure, having the financial means to leave and get the healthcare that she desired.

Ms. Watts was a frightened young woman who had left the hospital twice before her miscarriage. Yet she’s charged with felony abuse of a corpse in Ohio.

Abstract

The Effects of the Dobbs Decision on Fertility*

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization sparked the most profound transformation of the landscape of abortion access in 50 years. We provide the first estimates of the effects of this decision on fertility using a preregistered synthetic difference-in-differences design applied to newly released provisional natality data for the first half of 2023. The results indicate that states with abortion bans experienced an average increase in births of 2.3 percent relative to states where abortion was not restricted.

Source: The Effects of the Dobbs Decision on Fertility, IZA Institute of Labor Economics

The Dobbs Decision was a strategic salvo shot at the year 2045:

New census population projections confirm the importance of racial minorities as the primary demographic engine of the nation’s future growth, countering an aging, slow-growing, and soon-to-be-declining white population. The new statistics project that the nation will become “minority white” in 2045. During that year, whites will comprise 49.7 percent of the population in contrast to 24.6 percent for Hispanics, 13.1 percent for blacks, 7.9 percent for Asians, and 3.8 percent for multiracial populations (see Figure 1).

The shift is the result of two trends. First, between 2018 and 2060, gains will continue in the combined racial minority populations, growing by 74 percent. Second, during this time frame, the aging white population will see a modest immediate gain through 2024 and then experience a long-term decline through 2060, a consequence of more deaths than births (see Figure 2)

Source: Brookings Institution

24.6 (Hispanics) + 13.1 (African Americans) + 7.9 (Asians) + 3.8 (Multiracial) + 0.9 (Other) = 50.3%, which is apparently an existential crisis on the right because “white” supremacy is anxiously numerical.

Excerpt from “Black Labor, White Wealth: The Search for Power and Economic Justice,” (August 1, 1994) Claude Anderson, Ed. D., Chapter 2: Power and Black Progress:

Chapter 2, page 33, subsection titled:

Numerical Population Power

     In a democratic society, the numerical majority wins, rules, and decides. The theoretical rights of a minority may or may not be respected, especially if they are a planned minority. Numerical population power is the power that comes to those groups that acquire power through their sheer size. The black population peaked in the 1750s when slaves and free blacks accounted for approximately 33 percent of the total population. The high numerical strength of blacks caused fear and concern among whites. They feared the loss of their own numerical power. Word of black Haitians’ successful slave revolt in the 1790s had spread across America and reportedly ignited several slave revolts in Southern states.

     The First U.S. Congress enacted the first naturalization law that declared America to be a nation for “whites only.” The Naturalization Act and other income incentives attracted a mass influx of legal and illegal European ethnicities, followed by Asian and Hispanic immigrants a century later. The immigration quota for blacks remained zero until their total percentage of the population declined to nine percent. By making blacks a planned numerical minority, white society assured its dominance in a democratic society where the majority always wins. Source: Sample chapter

Hence, a national ban is actually what they want. Fifteen weeks will be sold as a “reasonable” compromise, and then it will be paired down to the goose egg that is the actual target. Hence, the hostility towards mixed-race couples and multiracial children from their union: they’re not on the “white” team. Hence, the hostility towards the LGBTQ community and whether or not they conceive by surrogate or artificial insemination, their union does not produce enough “white” babies to maintain a numerical majority for the “white” team. Mrs. Cox and upper-middle-class suburban women like her will always have the means and the money to flee any complications and save future childbearing years. Ms. Watt will have one of two options: either flush her undesired fetus while in a state of shock down a toilet or die from complications that she cannot afford to mitigate.

The American Eugenics Movement, unfortunately, had a boost from prominent scientists who wished to rid the world of the “feebleminded” and the unfit. They did this through forced sterilization and control over who could get married (to procreate in the first place). If you’ve ever used the terms “well-bred” or “good breeding,” those originate from eugenics, now accepted as a pseudoscience, once promoted by one of the founders of the transistor and Nobel laureate in Physics, William Schockley. Coupled with southern Jim Crow, eugenics-on-steroids in the hands of the Nazis led to the Holocaust.

Nazi authorities created the Lebensborn program to increase Germany’s population. Pregnant German women deemed “racially valuable” were encouraged to give birth to their children at Lebensborn homes. During World War II, the program became complicit in the kidnapping of foreign children with physical features considered “Aryan” by the Nazis.

Source: Lebensborn Program/U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

More Than 700,000 Ukrainian Children Taken To Russia Since Full-Scale War Started, Official Says, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty

Dramatic Population Drop in Russia, as War, COVID and Emigration Exacerbate Declining Births, Health Policy Watch

 The First U.S. Congress enacted the first naturalization law that declared America to be a nation for “whites only.” The Naturalization Act and other income incentives attracted a mass influx of legal and illegal European ethnicities, followed by Asian and Hispanic immigrants a century later. The immigration quota for blacks remained zero until their total percentage of the population declined to nine percent. By making blacks a planned numerical minority, white society assured its dominance in a democratic society where the majority always wins. Source: Sample chapter

If one is desperate to maintain a majority or “goose your numbers,” you might be capable of anything to achieve those ends.

Very soon in the founding of a new nation, however, White Christians began to establish their well-being by using the resources, bodies, and lives of others. Through their own “witchcraft,” European Christians employed a mysterious and threatening potency that was the practice of using the other for their own gain. In [James W.] Perkinson’s description, through the projects of modern Christian empire “a witchery” of heretofore unimaginable potency ravaged African and aboriginal cultures…For Perkinson, the witchcraft of White supremacy was conjured through racial discourse as an ideological and practical frame that he identifies as the ‘quintessential witchery of modernity.’… In Perkinson’s chilling words, “Whiteness, under the veneer of its ‘heavenly’ pallor, is a great grinding witch tooth, sucking blood and tearing flesh without apology.”

Excerpts: The Sin of White Supremacy: Christianity, Racism & Religious Diversity in America,” by Jeanine Hill Fletcher, CH 2: The Witchcraft of White Supremacy, 47, 48.

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Democracy, Existentialism, Fascism

I can hear an irritated counterthrust already. The president has not driven the United States into a recession during his almost seven years in office. Unemployment stands at a respectable 4.6 percent. Well, fine. But the other side of the ledger groans with distress: a tax code that has become hideously biased in favor of the rich; a national debt that will probably have grown 70 percent by the time this president leaves Washington; a swelling cascade of mortgage defaults; a record near-$850 billion trade deficit; oil prices that are higher than they have ever been; and a dollar so weak that for an American to buy a cup of coffee in London or Paris—or even the Yukon—becomes a venture in high finance.

And it gets worse. After almost seven years of this president, the United States is less prepared than ever to face the future. We have not been educating enough engineers and scientists, people with the skills we will need to compete with China and India. We have not been investing in the kinds of basic research that made us the technological powerhouse of the late 20th century. And although the president now understands—or so he says—that we must begin to wean ourselves from oil and coal, we have become more deeply dependent on both on his watch.

Up to now, the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle of “worst president” regarding stewardship of the American economy. Once Franklin Roosevelt assumed office and reversed Hoover’s policies, the country began to recover. The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting. There is no threat of America’s being displaced from its position as the world’s richest economy. But our grandchildren will still be living with and struggling with the economic consequences of Mr. Bush.

The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Vanity Fair, December 7, 2007

I am enjoying the New York Times bestseller by former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning. The book was sold out, so I bought the CDs to play on my car’s player as I casually drive to and from work. There are 11 CDs, and from the few I’ve listened to, she has an hour’s worth of material for each. The book is 384 pages.

I enjoy her erudite writing and observations of our current moment and crisis. Though we probably don’t agree on many things, I admire her integrity, love of her parents (particularly her dad), her family, and demonstrated fidelity to the US Constitution.

However, her dad was a part of the administration that Nobel laureate Dr. Stiglitz discusses in his Vanity Fair article. It was her dad who, instead of searching for a VP candidate, nominated himself. It was her dad who championed the disastrous war in Iraq, a country that did not attack us on September 11, 2001. He didn’t just “sex up” the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; he lied. That license led to thousands of Iraqis killed and the fertile ground from which sprang Al-Qaeda in Iraq, followed by ISIS. That license led to pathological licentiousness to lie more than 30,000 times in a four-year presidential term. “Deficits don’t matter” leads to truth not mattering—Post hoc ergo proctor hoc.

It was her dad who said:

“You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” he said, according to excerpts. Cheney continued: “We won the midterms [congressional elections]. This is our due.” A month later, in December 2002, Cheney told the Treasury secretary he was fired.

O’Neill says Cheney told him, `Deficits don’t matter,’ Chicago Tribune, January 12, 2004

I remember reading this on my Kindle: The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill, Ron Suskind. For Liz’s dad, deficits didn’t matter. That drove the drunken stupor of tax cuts that led to the cliff we almost fell off in 2008. There was a real crisis when the Obama-Biden administration took office after the financial crash spawned by the “deficits don’t matter” philosophy.

Wall Street was, of course, bailed out over Main Street. COVID bailouts benefitted the rich. That’s why Wall Street is more than willing to do it again. Until we see some CEOs and Hedge Fund Managers frog-marched in shackles, what onus stops them?

The Dow Jones hit a record 37,000+ Thursday. Yet, we’re into how we “feel” about the economy. I don’t think it’s “feelings.”

Inflation soared across the globe last year, peaking near 11% in the eurozone and above 9% in the US.

The source of that high inflation has become a well-trodden line. Analysts have typically laid the blame on supply-chain bottlenecks created by excess demand during the COVID-19 pandemic and exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The war also increased energy prices, leading to further rises in inflation as suppliers factored in higher transport and running costs.

While this contributed to rising prices, the report finds that company profits increased at a much faster rate than costs did, in a process often dubbed “greedflation.”

Profits for companies in some of the world’s largest economies rose by 30% between 2019 and 2022, significantly outpacing inflation, according to the group’s research of 1,350 firms across the US, the UK, Europe, Brazil, and South Africa.

The biggest perpetrators were energy companies like Shell, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron, which were able to enjoy massive profits last year as demand moved away from Russian oil and gas.

A June study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) found that 45% of eurozone inflation in 2022 could be attributed to domestic profits. Companies in a position to benefit most from higher commodity prices and supply-demand mismatches raised their profits by the most, the study found.

CEOs of the world’s biggest companies consistently sounded the alarm on inflation as a significant barrier to growth. Many blamed rising input costs on their own price hikes. However, lots of those CEOs appear to have instead used the panic of rising costs to pump up their balance sheet.

The biggest study of ‘greedflation’ yet looked at 1,300 corporations to find many of them were lying to you about inflation, Ryan Hogg, Yahoo Finance, December 8, 2023

In essence, gaslighting is the psychological manipulation of a person, usually over an extended period of time, that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator—the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for one’s own advantage. Election season can create emotions spanning from immense anxiety all the way to extreme apathy. The public arguing, divisiveness, and competition for votes, including political gaslighting, can be overwhelming and exhausting.—Vernita Perkins and Leonard A. Jason, Merriam-Webster.

Political gaslighting has one objective: to undermine the truth, or more accurately, to undermine objective truth.

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Winston Smith, in “1984” by George Orwell. Under torture, O’Brien makes Winston say he sees five fingers when O’Brien is holding up four. The Party was the arbiter of truth, and “truth” was whatever the Party or O’Brien said it was.

“There are FOUR lights!” Jean Luc Picard shouted defiantly under torture by Gul Madred in Star Trek: The Next Generation: “Chain of Command, part II.”

There are strategies to combat gaslighting. Despair can be debilitating and a self-fulfilling prophecy if the worst possible outcome that you can think of happens.

The best strategy I know to combat despair is to work on a campaign that you’re passionate about. In 2012, it didn’t look like Barack Obama and Joe Biden would get re-elected against Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan (former Speaker of the House – remember him?). My wife and I volunteered to call from the campaign office of Sean Patrick Maloney, who we had never heard of. He won and became our Congressman as long as we lived in New York. He sadly lost his seat when congressional districts were redrawn, so he was competing for the same votes as another Democrat.

The best weapon against gaslighting is truth.

Liz Cheney is telling the truth and bringing receipts—truth matters.

She quotes her dad on the second CD, who admonished her to “save the republic, daughter,” missing the irony his “deficits don’t matter” rhetoric spawned what we’re all living through.

Take heart. Tell the truth. Truth matters in the face of lies. Grind it out next year and vote.