SOURCES: Sam Harris is WRONG! about free will.
Is Sam Harris Right About Free Will?: A Book Review Stewart Goetz. 5 26 2014. Biola University. Reflections on Sam Harris’ “Free Will” Daniel C. Dennett. 2017. RIVISTA INTERNAZIONALE DI FILOSOFIA E PSICOLOGIA. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/228272025.pdf The Marionette’s Lament Sam Harris. 2 12 2014.
The Feds Have Doled Out Record Farm Subsidies To Save Trump’s Campaign
“The New York Times details the “gush of funds” Trump has promised U.S. farmers—with more on the way. Some say total farm subsidies could top $40 billion this year. The Times says the figure may be as high as $46 billion. Either figure would be a record.”
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“Critics have seized on the manner in which the Trump administration is subsidizing farmers—mostly outside of the traditional (though also lousy) programs funded under the five-year Farm Bill.
“[T]he bulk of USDA payments to farmers since 2017 have flowed through stop-gap programs created by the Trump administration, with payment limits far larger than those that apply to the traditional farm program,” Successful Farming reported in August.
The combination of farm subsidies included in the current Farm Bill and subsidies doled out under Trump’s executive order means, the Times reports, that two out of every five dollars American farmers receive this year will come directly from taxpayers.
Critics, including many Democrats, argue the funds are being doled out as political favors. They appear to have a point. Last month, for example, during an election rally in Wisconsin, Trump announced additional payments to farmers totaling $13 billion.
Non-partisan observers have also labeled them political handouts. “The Government Accountability Office found last month that $14.5 billion of farm aid in 2019 had been handed out with politics in mind,” The Week reports. The Times, citing the same GAO report, also highlighted by some Democrats, shows farm subsidies last year appeared to be directed to “big farms in the Midwest and southern states,” mirroring at least some segments of Trump’s farm base.
That same base has been hit hard by tariffs championed by Trump. In 2018, I predicted (as did many others) that Trump’s international trade tariffs would spur retaliatory tariffs and harm U.S. farmers and consumers in the process. They did just that.
But because Trump’s tariffs hurt U.S. farmers, and because he wants them to vote for him again, he’s sending them cash. That cash even has a name. Last year, one farmer NPR food-policy writer Dan Charles spoke with says he and his fellow farmers have taken to referring to the tariff-induced subsidies as “Trump money.”
“The U.S. Department of Agriculture simply sent [the farmer] a check to compensate him for the low prices resulting from the trade war,” Charles explains.
Most of Trump’s subsidies have gone to large producers.
“Despite the record amount of farm welfare payments doled out by this administration, the smaller struggling family farmers get next to nothing while wealthy landowners and massive, highly profitable agribusiness hoover up most of the federal dollars,” says Don Carr, a senior advisor with the Environmental Working Group, in an email to me this week. “I’m old enough to remember when a Minnesota millionaire qualifying for a puny food stamp benefit was a scandal, yet few feathers get ruffled when rich land barons collect million-dollar government welfare checks.””
The Federal Death Penalty Returns
“Prior to 2020, the last federal death row inmate to be executed was Louis Jones Jr., put to death by lethal injection in 2003. Only three federal prisoners were executed under GOP President George W. Bush, among them Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. None were executed under Democratic President Barack Obama.
Seventeen years after Jones’ execution, on July 14, the United States government executed Daniel Lewis Lee. Just two days later, the feds executed Wesley Ira Purkey. The next day, the feds executed Dustin Lee Honken. On August 26, they executed Lezmond Mitchell. The Trump administration has now executed more death row inmates than any president since Dwight Eisenhower.”
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“When Barr made his announcement, he said that the Justice Department and the federal government “owe it to their victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”
But in Lee’s case, the family of the victims had opposed his execution for years.”
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“Barr’s move is a significant reversal of a broad trend away from capital punishment. State-level executions have been on the decline since 2000. Since 1973, 170 inmates on death row have been exonerated, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Three have been freed just this year. There’s a very real possibility that if federal executions continue, Barr will be sending innocent men to their deaths.”
Who Was ‘El Padrino,’ Godfather to Drug Cartel? Mexico’s Defense Chief, U.S. Says
https://news.yahoo.com/el-padrino-godfather-drug-cartel-142755353.html
Study pinpoints places, from gyms to restaurants, where people are at high risk of contracting COVID-19
“The study, which was published in the journal Nature, used cellphone data to track the hourly movements of 98 million people from 57,000 neighborhoods to points of interest, like restaurants, churches and stores, for two months, starting in March. The location data, which was collected by SafeGraph, a company that aggregates anonymous location data from mobile apps, came from 10 of the largest U.S. cities, including Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia.
The research team then compared those movements with COVID-19 case counts for each area. Next they used a model to simulate different scenarios, like reopening some venues while others stayed closed. The researchers also estimated COVID-19 infections based on restrictions, or lack thereof, in these areas.
Overall, the researchers determined that opening restaurants at full capacity led to the largest increase in infections. Opening gyms, cafes, hotels and motels at full capacity also created a jump in infections.”
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“It’s not all doom and gloom: The researchers found that putting a 30 percent occupancy cap on all venues could dramatically decrease infections. Infections were further decreased when the cap was at 20 percent.
It’s important to note that this is a model — it didn’t definitively link cases to these spots. Instead it found that the locations are likely to contribute to the spread of the virus.
But there have been real-world examples that suggest the latest findings are onto something. In October, an indoor spin class in Canada was linked to at least 69 cases of COVID-19. In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shared a case report detailing how up to 87 percent of the members of a choir in Washington state became infected after a 2.5-hour practice alongside a member with COVID-19 who was asymptomatic. And a report published by the CDC in September found that adults who tested positive for COVID-19 were twice as likely to have reported dining out at a restaurant than those who did not contract the virus.”
Pandemic on course to overwhelm U.S. health system before Biden takes office
“The United States’ surging coronavirus outbreak is on pace to hit nearly 1 million new cases a week by the end of the year — a scenario that could overwhelm health systems across much of the country and further complicate President-elect Joe Biden’s attempts to coordinate a response.
Biden, who is naming his own coronavirus task force Monday, has pledged to confront new shortages of protective gear for health workers and oversee distribution of masks, test kits and vaccines while beefing up contact tracing and reengaging with the World Health Organization. He will also push Congress to pass a massive Covid-19 relief package and pressure the governors who’ve refused to implement mask mandates for new public health measures as cases rise.”
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““If you want to have a better 2021, then maybe the rest of 2020 needs to be an investment in driving the virus down,” said Cyrus Shahpar, a former emergency response leader at the CDC who now leads the outbreak tracker Covid Exit Strategy. “Otherwise we’re looking at thousands and thousands of deaths this winter.””
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“The number of Americans hospitalized with Covid-19 has spiked to 56,000, up from 33,000 one month ago. In many areas of the country, shortages of ICU beds and staff are leaving patients piled up in emergency rooms. And nearly 1,100 people died on Saturday alone, according to the Covid Tracking Project.”
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“even if Biden and his task force start promoting public health measures now, it will take weeks to see a reduction in hospitalizations and deaths — even if states clamp down. And there is little indication that the country will drastically change its behavior in the near term.”
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“in the Dakotas and other states where the virus is raging, governors are resisting calls from health experts to mandate masks and restrict gatherings. On Sunday morning, South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem incorrectly attributed her state’s huge surge in cases to an increase in testing and praised Trump’s approach of giving her the “flexibility to do the right thing.” The state has no mask mandate.
And unlike earlier waves in the spring and summer that were confined to a handful of states or regions, the case numbers are now surging everywhere.”
How Trump Sold Failure to 70 Million People
“On Wednesday, the U.S. shattered the world record for daily coronavirus cases by topping 100,000 for the first time—only to break the record again each subsequent day until a Saturday high of 128,000. Field hospitals and makeshift morgues are appearing around the country. Daily death counts have risen to more than 1,000.”
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“The president has variously lied by his own admission, denied the severity of the disease, and promised false cures, all as the death toll shot into the hundreds of thousands.”
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“Biden won decisively, but more than 70 million Americans still voted for Trump. That’s more than those who voted for him in the 2016 election”
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“One exit poll found that the virus was the most important issue guiding more than 40 percent of voters. But somehow, 80 percent of Republican voters said they believe that the virus is at least “somewhat under control” in the same week that cases reached record numbers. The virus alone clearly did not scare an overwhelming number of people away from voting for Trump.”
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“Trump’s vacuous promises about the virus were more than self-serving, disingenuous, and deadly; they were also convincing and appealing to many people. Understanding why will be crucial to America’s pandemic response even after Trump is out of office.
The narratives and tactics Trump used to persuade people to trust him as a sole beacon of truth—amid a sea of corrupt, lying scientists and doctors—draw on those of cult leaders, self-proclaimed healers, and wellness charlatans as much as those of authoritarian demagogues. They have proved effective over centuries. In 1927, the British physician A. J. Clark lamented the proliferation of “quackery” in the medical profession. The term was once simply synonymous with fraud. “The fact that this term has come to signify, in popular usage, a pretender to medical knowledge indicates very clearly that there is something about the cure of disease that particularly attracts both delusion and imposture,” Clark wrote. That is, when we are sick or threatened by disease, we seem to be uniquely susceptible to scams.”
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“Sellers depend on information asymmetry, wherein it’s hard for consumers to know if a product is effective, but very easy to believe that it is. If someone tries to sell you a car that doesn’t have wheels, you know it. If someone tries to sell you a secret vitamin that’s going to prolong your life, you just have to trust him (or not).
The same holds if someone tells you that an invisible virus is going to disappear. Trump’s primary approach to the pandemic has been to tell people what they would like to be true. He has promised, repeatedly: Everything will go back to normal; everyone will have amazing treatments; there will be a vaccine very soon; the disease isn’t that serious, anyway. The fact that these are conflicting claims—not to mention patently false—can only partly detract from their allure. To avoid scrutiny, quacks use misdirection. In textbook form, Trump consistently pointed to another threat that, by comparison, made the actual threat (the virus) seem smaller: Stopping the coronavirus would kill jobs. This is a false dichotomy. The two issues are conjoined. Economies collapse when going outside is dangerous; they thrive when people not only feel safe, but actually are safe.
Like any competent quack, Trump focuses on a winning vibe, not a factual case. He positions himself as an alternative to “the scientists” and “the doctors” such that followers have to choose between trusting them or him. This process, in extreme forms, leads to what some psychologists refer to as identity fusion. William Swann, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, coined the term in 2009 while studying theories of individual identity. Once fused with a group or leader, he noticed, followers seem tied to them in such a way that things are true because the leader said them. Dystopian as that may seem, it can be a coping mechanism: Orienting your sense of truth around a person can be more comforting than doing so around a nebulous, uncertain, or otherwise threatening reality. Fusion is not appealing because it makes sense; it is appealing because it alleviates the cognitive and emotional burden of thinking.”
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“The freedom from scrutiny Trump now enjoys from many of his followers is reflected in an ignorance even of where he stands on the pandemic. In the survey of 4,000 Americans, 81 percent of Trump voters who believed that masks should be required also believed that Trump agrees. He has not supported a mask mandate, and has barely even endorsed their voluntary use.”
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“There are ways to serve as a confident, optimistic leader without making up nonsensical promises.”
Republican Lawsuits Cannot Deliver the Evidence Trump Needs To Prove He Actually Won the Election
Trump’s attempt to overturn the election result is ramping up. Here’s what comes next.
“President Trump is refusing to concede the election. Most Republican senators, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, won’t yet acknowledge that president-elect Joe Biden won. And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday there will be a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration” (though perhaps he was joking).
So, you may be wondering … what’s going to happen?
With GOP politicians’ rhetoric all over the place, it’s useful to focus on concrete matters. Two things will happen over the next five weeks that ordinarily would be formalities, but in a disputed election will be crucial.
First, states will certify their election results — December 8 is the deadline set by federal law, but most states have set earlier deadlines. Second, once state results are certified, the Electoral College will cast the votes that will officially choose the next president, on December 14.
Both of these processes are currently on track to make Biden the next president. And despite all the sound and fury, nothing happening yet appears likely to get in the way of either process.
That could change, however. The dangerous scenario would be if some combination of Republican state officials, Republican legislators, and Republican-appointed judges attempts to block the certification of results in key states Biden won, or to replace Biden electors with Trump electors — likely citing assertions that the election results were plagued by some type of fraud.
But up to this point, Trump’s lawsuits have had little success. Republican state officials involved in the counts have insisted they’ve found no fraud, and there are no solid plans among GOP state legislators to change the outcome. To assess whether Trump’s ploy to overturn the election results is successful, keep an eye on whether any of these change in the coming weeks.”