Beyond acceding to Donald Trump’s fondest dreams, what are we possibly to make of the FBI seizing 700 ballot boxes, voter machine tapes, digital data and voter rolls reflecting 2020 votes from a Fulton Country warehouse? How could we possibly not see this as Trump-fueled revenge and a blinking warning about the kind of challenges to expect in November’s elections?

Days later, the FBI’s execution last week of a judicially signed search warrant served by armor-clad agents clearly still feels extraordinary both politically and legally, and it represents a significant escalation in Trump’s breaking of democratic norms. It certainly reflects Trump’s obsession with having been declared a loser and a warning that he will do anything to influence this year’s elections.

But what exactly is supposed to happen with these ballots and tapes? What are they supposed to  show? There still is no justification for what Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was doing at the search. Even if we accept that she has decided to worry about election “security,” nothing offers a reason to be present during the serving of a warrant to gather evidence.

Though even the optics of a seizure may appease Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him, what is the practical outcome here? Aren’t these the same votes and ballots recounted multiple times by the state officials responsible for them? Aren’t these the very results that were the arguments in Rudy Giuliani’s loss in court of a defamation suit worth $148 million charging fraud by two election mother and daughter election workers?

Trump blamed results in Georgia for his loss to Joe Biden, pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,781 more votes. Recently, he promised anew to prosecute those responsible for rigging the election. Trump and his allies filed more than 60 legal cases across the nation seeking to overturn the 2020 election results — all of which failed, even those before Trump-appointed judges.

Can Trump Find His Votes?

The warrant said the materials to be seized might be “evidence of the commission of a criminal offense.” It cited stiff criminal penalties related to “the procurement, casting, or tabulation” of fraudulent ballots. Weirdly, this material already had been requested in a state-federal lawsuit, but release was held up by court order.

We don’t know what evidence or argument was presented to the judge who signed the search warrant; only the FBI presented its reasons. There is no suggestion of new evidence emerging, so the timing is off. A search warrant does not mean a crime was committed or by whom. Rather it means that there is probably cause to look at these elements.

Even a cursory look at the seizure raises a host of questions.

The first is what does the FBI hope to find that no previous investigation or recounting determined? In 2023, Giuliani conceded that while acting as a lawyer for. Trump, he made false statements by asserting that two Atlanta election workers had mishandled ballots.

Then there is the timing. This is 2026, and the voting was in 2020. Most federal and state election laws seem to have a statue of limitations clause that expires after five years. Can any “evidence” unearthed here even be submitted to a court in a criminal trial?

Who is going to review these records, if not the state and county election officials? Is the FBI going to do its own recount, or perhaps hire an outside private company whose background and political lean will be put under endless scrutiny? Who designates that they are not altered once out of the hands of election officials?

How is anyone reviewing the ballots supposed to determine “intent” as required by fraud laws?

And, of course, if Trump’s FBI and Justice Department magically “find” 11,781 votes, do we replay the last six years and re-install Donald Trump as president. Or better yet, determine that he already has served twice as president and cannot Constitutionally finish this would-be third term?

An Egotistical Warning

We’re left with the other conclusion possible here. There is no practical way for Trump to un-rig the 2020 election, but he can use his Justice Department and FBI to harass those who dare to suggest that he lost.

While such dreams may serve the infantile Trump ego, the real value is in signaling to an already wary electorate that Trump, who is not on any ballot in November, still wants an outcome that will leave him with a Republican Congress that will stand down from oversight and questioning of his administration.

To that end, he has endorsed and promoted congressional gerrymandering changes in multiple states, he is threatening to outlaw mail ballots and voter machines that are state controlled, he is choosing candidates to primary any congress member who challenges him, and he is encouraging the social media doxing or prosecution of political enemies. He is pushing for closing of polling stations in Black districts believed to favor Democrats.

And the example of ICE armies and National Guard deployments  in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and Washington show that he is willing to have the appearance of military law in place to squelch voter turn-out.

Of course, he wanted the FBI to seize ballots and tapes, even if there is no prosecution case to develop sufficiently in the months before the election. His own reputation as a constant winner and his hatred for those who stand up to him are way more important than retaining a democracy.

Happy 250^th America.

IF YOU VALUE YOUR RIGHT, HELP US PROTECT THEM. PLEASE CONSIDER A DONATION TODAY. 

The post Seizing 2020 Ballots in Georgia appeared first on DCReport.org.

You wish that you could say it’s what money does to them, and that can be part of it, but it’s not all. You wish it could be ascribed to people with wealth that is inherited, or wealth that has been recently come by, but people from both groups are among them. You wish that it isn’t about money and privilege and, yes, race, but it is. And you wish most of all that it wasn’t true, that there aren’t people who are cruel, people who are so self-centered that they have no feeling for others, people who have no feelings at all, people who are soulless and empty, people who expel with every breath air that stains and pollutes the earth’s atmosphere for the rest of us, but you know that there are such people, and we know some of their names.

You may know, and I do know, rich people who are not like them, who are like us, who listen to and support NPR, who have shown up in basements and churches for meetings to help the poor or heal the planet or work for peace. So, it’s not just about money. It’s about something else.

With certain of them, and I think you know who I’m talking about, it is always about power, about the will to amass power, about the will to use it for personal gain, about the drive to abuse power by employing it to damage others, about what we can only call the evil that power can bring with it. We ask ourselves, where does that come from? We look back in our own lives and find examples from what you might call ordinary life – bullies on the playground, in school, in jobs, in relationships we may have had. We asked ourselves as children, as young adults, and again when we got out in the world as adults, where it comes from, the drive to dominate and harm others. We examined our own experience to find if there was some of it in us, if we had misused power of whatever level when we achieved it, or when it was given to us, and if we were honest, we found ourselves guilty. There was someone who asked for our help, and we were too busy, too self-involved, too unthinking for whatever reason to lend a hand. There were those we were just mean to.

We feel shame, and we find that we changed, and sometimes we even made amends. In other words, we acted like human beings.

But what of those who are – there is no other word for it – inhuman? I remember with great clarity the day I discovered that all of this is nothing new, that it has been studied for centuries, indeed for millennia, that great tomes have been written in search of answers. I was a junior in high school taking honors classes and I took an elective in philosophy, and one day, the teacher walked into the room where only about a dozen of us sat at our desks, and he introduced the topic of “man’s inhumanity to man.” I was fascinated. He asked us if we could think of any examples. I was from an Army family, and I raised my hand and answered, “war.” The teacher said yes, but there were other, less obvious, examples, weren’t there?

We spent the next two months on that topic alone in that philosophy class, I guess because it was so bottomless.

Later in life, I came to learn that people make war on each other for many more reasons than imperial ambitions or revenge for perceived losses, or because of belief in religious doctrine. People are not inherently cruel or born in sin as some religions would have you think, but they are like faulty engines, flawed inside themselves in some way, and because they are human, the flaws cause them to act in ways that will hurt others.

But this stuff we are in the middle of, these daily revelations from – I will not use his name – those files, are something different and, if it is possible, worse than the big shooting wars countries make against each other, and the little wars we wage against each other in our ordinary lives. This is in so many ways beyond our comprehension, or at least that is how it feels until we remember the scandals of abuse of children by the Catholic church, the scandal of the Irish mother and baby homes, the scandal of the “schools” for native Americans and Canadians that produced such terrible abuses of children in the name of one authority or another.

And we remember the horrors visited upon children alongside their mothers and fathers in the Holocaust.

It is not necessary to ask ourselves which is worse, because it seems all of a piece. Or is it?

What makes it different this time is that these horrors seem recreational. There is no reason other than satisfaction of desires and urges that are untethered to anything other than pleasure. This is where money and wealth and power have made possible what we read about in those files but does not explain it. To gain wealth, or have wealth, has not made these men do what they have done to the more than 1,000 children who were their victims. As Susan Brownmiller taught us in her groundbreaking book, “Against Our Will,” rape is not about sex, it is about power.

But sexual abuse of anyone – male or female, adult or child – is not explained as a question of power any more than war is explained as a question of imperial ambition or revenge or dominance in trade or any of the other reasons given for the wars that humans have waged against each other since the beginning of recorded history. We know that war happened before anyone could record it on the walls of caves or on tablets of clay or etched into stone.

It feels like going in a circle, doesn’t it? An unsatisfying journey through something that cannot be explained or understood in any way other than the inhumanity of these people, most of them but not all, men. But if it is yet another instance of man’s inhumanity to man, do we find the connective tissue in the root “human?” Or do we find it in that other word, evil, that has been employed to explain the things we cannot understand about ourselves and our world?

I don’t have an answer, but I do know this: We are different from them, because we have the capacity to feel.

Leave a comment

Share

Give a gift subscription

The Opinionated Ogre is 100% reader-supported. Please help me continue to inform/amuse/outrage you by becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!)! If not, it’s all good. Welcome to the Ogre Nation anyway!

🌟BECOME A CONTRIBUTING SUBSCRIBER!🌟

Prefer a one-and-done tip? Click here!

Welp! Hell has frozen over. Almost. And I don’t mean because a large chunk of the country is covered in “snowcrete” and it’s snowing in Florida.1 This is an actual headline in The Guardian today:

I have absolutely no idea who Jan-Werner Müller is. His write-up says he’s a professor of politics at Princeton University so, I guess he’s smart? And yet, he doesn’t quite stick the landing. But, man, he’s definitely onto something and I really REALLY hope he sinks his teeth in like a starving dog on a bone:

The basic idea is that self-declared moderates claim equally to oppose extremes on the right and on the left – but hard-hitting criticism is reserved almost exclusively for the left (partly, perhaps, because the presumed audience is expected to already know how bad things are on the right).

This perceptive observation was inadvertently vindicated in thousands of columns that contributed to a moral panic about “wokeness” and “identity politics”. It convinced readers that, sure, Trump was horrible, but what was happening “on campus” (translation: anecdotes from one or two elite places, endlessly recycled) was also putting US democracy in peril.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter or listening to the podcast for more than ten seconds, you know exactly what Müller is talking about. I’ve been screaming about this shit for years, before I even had the proper vocabulary to describe it. I didn’t even know the word “bothsiderism” until several years ago but I knew the alt-left was doing it way back in 2017 and the legacy press was doing it even longer than that. These are the two groups that ratfuck us nonstop.

Müller is talking more about the legacy press than he is the professional “far-left” (who fully supports white nationalism, somehow). The “very concerned” journalists who can’t seem to tell the difference between a progressive pushing for universal healthcare and a literal Nazi demanding the mass execution of progressive pushing for universal healthcare. It’s all so very confusing! They’re both so extreme in their demands!

Müller gets this aspect of bothsiderism:

The point is not that what progressives do must never be criticized; the point is that the relentless drive to find fault with both sides equally results in a sense of (false) equivalence among those taking cues from supposedly trustworthy centrists.

But then he misses the mark again:

This dynamic may well have not made a difference in the election outcome in 2024.

The fuck it didn’t. People voted for Trump because the legacy press and the alt-left created a permission structure for them to do so. Sure, Trump had staged an insurrection. Sure, Trump was a rapist. Sure, Trump was a thief, a liar, a literal traitor who had stolen classified documents and “lost” dozens of them. Sure, half a million Americans had died on his watch as he let Covid run rampant on fucking purpose.

But my goodness! Look at how extreme Democrats are! They support trans kids playing sports! They support unions! They support immigrants! That’s just fucking insane! And did we mention the trans thing!? Did you know Joe Biden is old? He’s soooo fucking old! And Kamala Harris is a woman with no policies. Or too many policies. No, Trump doesn’t have any policy proposals at all, but we’re not talking about him right now!

My god, what about Gaza? Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are blood-drenched monsters! So much worse than anything Trump could possibly do! Honest! Why, nothing in Trump’s decades of rabid racism could ever suggest he would be worse for Gaza! Democrats are clearly the warmongers!

We watched the legacy press and the alt-left spend a full year shamelessly spreading these lies over and over again. Of course it helped put Trump back in power. That was the point. There was even a word for what the press did for Trump: “Sanewashing.” The deliberate act of taking the insane ramblings of a deeply sick and dying man and laundering them for public consumption. Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s every stutter was proof he would be dead before November.

If Trump dies before Joe Biden, it will take every ounce of my self-restraint not to find Jake Tapper and slap him across his smug fucking face.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

Join The Ogre Nation Conversation!

Müller, however, makes up for this painful error by exposing the lie at the center of “bothsiderism”:

The other iron law of reactionary centrism – beyond the asymmetry that is hiding behind the seeming evenhandedness – is that only the left and liberals really have agency. The right just reacts – everything is always backlash, never a self-generated political project. As a result, it takes a while to wake up to the reality that, for instance, Stephen Miller’s ethnic cleansing project is self-generated, and not only a response to “legitimate grievances” about border security.

This is vital to any discussion about bothsiderism. It’s baked into the language the legacy press and the alt-left use. “Washington.” “Congress.” “The Establishment.” “Politicians.” Republicans pass a bill stripping funding for school lunches? It’s “Washington.” The GOP cancels dozens of green energy projects Democrats funded? It’s “Congress.” On the other hand, as Müller notes, Democrats pass a bill to protect voting rights and the “Republican backlash” is all their fault, as if the racist white men of the American right have not been blocking access to the ballot for over a century.

It’s all part of the game the press and the alt-left play to protect the right from the consequences of their actions. If everything the right does is a reaction, if everything they do is because they were “forced” to do it by the left, then you can’t really blame them, can you?

After all, the left made America accept gay marriage, so is it really the right’s fault they became even more homophobic? The left made America stop using racial slurs, so is it really the fault of the right that they became twice as racist? The left elected a fucking ██████ as president, so is it really the fault of the right that they turned to white nationalism and fascism?! Stop blaming poor innocent oppressed white men for everything, you fucking reverse racist! Take some responsibility!

The answer to that, of course, is suck my sweaty Jewarican balls, and if you thought racist white men were oppressed before, wait until the regime falls and Nuremberg II: Electric Chair Boogaloo starts, you treasonous fucks. Maybe going all in on fascism and genocide wasn’t such a good idea. Too late to go back in the Nazi closet now, though. Oh well.

Look, Müller may not get all the notes exactly right, but he’s definitely playing the right tune.2 He absolutely understands how dangerous these assholes are, even if, as a Princeton professor, he’s far too polite to put it that way. He does, however, end his piece with a warning:

The Joe Biden years were accompanied by a chorus of “don’t overdo it”. A post-Trump US may well see a revival of the greatest hits of the reactionary background singers. Think before listening.

Not “may well see,” absolutely 100% goddamn guaranteed WILL see. After the midterm bloodbath and Trump’s failed attempt to steal it, the legacy press is going to fly into damage control mode. There will be any number of columns begging Democrats, who will now be in control of the House and probably the Senate: Please please PLEASE for the love of God! Do not impeach Trump for a third time! Think of the strain on the nation! Think of how divisive it will! Sure, Trump just tried to overturn the results of the misterms and people were hurt in the process, but can’t we just move forward and hold him accountable in the 2028 election!??!!?

Meanwhile, the alt-left will be gearing up to tell people not to vote in 2028. I promise you, they will be out there every single day telling voters that if Democrats get back into power, something something Israel genocide Gaza argle barlge. Sure, Trump gave Netanyahu the greenlight to kill everything that moved, but, really, aren’t Democrats just as guilty? Aren’t they MORE guilty? Aren’t Democrats the REAL monsters controlled by the fucking Jews Israel?!

The legacy press and alt-left will be in overdrive to maintain the lie of bothsiderism. A year from now, the regime will be so far off the edge, the legacy press will have to fabricate from whole cloth Democratic extremism to “balance the scales.” By 2028, the GOP will be openly appealing to Nazis and actual Democrats will be erased from news coverage lest they appear too rational and normal, making Republicans look like the fucking monsters they are. Better to just tell the public how extreme both sides are and let them decide for themselves, right? That’s only fair. And we have to be fair, don’t we? That’s the point of bothsiderism! Fairness, and not at all to hide the utter insanity and soulless cruelty of the GOP.

Still, it’s a good sign that someone in the legacy press is calling this bullshit out. Hopefully, this will not be the last time Müller writes about this. You'd better be goddamn sure it won't be the last time I write about it. Müller may not quite grasp the intentional lie at the center of all of this, but I surely do, and I will never EVER stop calling these ratfucking assholes out until the last one of them resigns in disgrace.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

🔥Burn Fascism To The Ground!🔥

Can’t do a sub? We got you!

There are 272 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

He’s Amplified Faked Porn of Real People, and Cutting Him off Is $Imple

Fake pictures of women nude or in pornographic situations have been around for a while. Elon Musk’s AI program Grok, and it’s easy connection to his X social media, have exponentially amplified and simplified that. He could easily choose not to.

Why should he? There was an interview recently that spells it all out very well. It was on the NPR show Science Friday. The interview was with Hany Farid, professor at UC Berkeley School of Information who has studied related issues for decades. Here I quote both his interview and his message to me when I asked more about all this.

One problem is the volume of abusively fake images. Just in recent weeks it has exploded as people unskilled in making them have discovered that with a few clicks and prompts they can make excellent ones in seconds using Grok.

Another problem is the quality. You can grab any image you have or off the net and tell Grok to put the person in some pornographic situation and it will perfectly put their face on a AI generated image while maintaining the background. So it looks like that person is in a setting they would know while doing whatever. They are so good that, in testing, people have little better odds than simply guessing whether it’s real or not.

A third problem is what it does to people. Did you have some social awkwardness in high school? Imagine if, back then, someone made a horribly embarrassing fake picture, put it on social media bound to be seen by many, and now you have to spend the day in school, while trying to deny it’s real. All while you don’t know if it was some of them who made it. And in adult life, with that kind of picture out there, will you get the job offer? The rental you’re applying for? The date through the dating app you’re trying for?

A fourth problem is it’s sometimes images of children, as reported by The Verge.

And fifth is sometimes such images of teenagers aren’t just for posting, they’re sent to the victims to extort them.

The New York Times just reported that the European Union is investigating the X platform for possible violation of their regulations on these issues. In response they say, “X limited Grok’s A.I. image creation to users who paid for premium features” and, “later expanded those guardrails, saying that it would no longer allow anyone to prompt Grok’s X account for ‘images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis.’ That sounds like a loophole. As if people who pay, and people who use Grok directly then post either on X or other social media can continue. Unclear but the European Union is not satisfied and is proceeding with their investigation.

The thing is there are simple fixes for this. I love when big problems have simple fixes. Those are called elegant solutions.

One of those solutions would be as simple as Elon Musk deciding he’s rich enough that he doesn’t have to allow this to happen. As Mr. Farid pointed out, “take many of the prompts that you’re seeing people put into Grok AI and try to put them into OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, and it won’t work” because those companies have simply programmed filters into their AI to refuse such requests. Obviously Grok could be programmed the same. As Mr. Farid pointed out though we need to stop simply appealing to media CEOs and hope they’ll play nice when there are solutions with more clout.

Along those lines he had several other solutions that don’t depend on Musk or media CEOs. They are conceptually simple. They’re not easy because they all have to do with money, but they are doable.

One: Apple and Google could easily declare the app a violation of their app store policies because of it being used for so much abuse, and they could refuse to carry the app. Boom! Suddenly step one, get the app, is blocked.

Two: Stop the advertising that goes with it. When these images are posted on social media a great deal of them are shown next to ads. If many of the biggest advertisers were shamed into demanding that their ads not be shown next to such images, the profit behind it would take a huge hit. In his message he noted about the advertisers, “they hold the power to effect change.”

Three: Mr. Farid noted that there are also websites, separate from Grok or X, that offer making such images as a service. Upload a picture, ask what you want it turned into, pay a fee, and they’ll make the fake for you. But did you notice a little phrase in there, “pay a fee”? How is that fee paid? Often such sites accept standard credit cards and common online payment systems. Shame those big banks and financial companies into refusing to process for such sites and there goes that system. Mr. Farid noted in his message this has actually been done before, when PornHub lost the ability to accept payments after revelations of child pornography. Fake image sites could get around the ban by accepting payment in crypto but most novices don’t know how to make raw crypto transactions. They only do it through some financial service that handles it for them. Same thing. Shame those financial services into refusing those sites. The beauty of this solution is it even applies to sites hosted in countries where there is no law or enforcement that would otherwise stop it.

So, there are simple solutions to a big problem, a serious problem that does serious damage to many people, where the only issue is a small hit to the money some big companies make. If it’s the big companies and the profits that decide the end result and the damage to people is allowed to continue, doesn’t that perfectly fit the definition of an oligarchy? Seriously, how else can one explain such a result? Bernie Sanders is being right on target.

IF YOU HAVE THE MEANS, PLEASE CONSIDER SUPPORTING OUR INDEPENDENT NONPROFIT NEW GATHERING AND SHARING.

The post Musk, Horrific Abuse, Simple Fix appeared first on DCReport.org.

Healthy babies, to be specific.  Because worldwide, infant and child mortality has fallen greatly; and is still falling; and will almost certainly continue to fall.  

In premodern societies, meaning pretty much the entire world before 1820 or so, between a fifth and a quarter of all kids died before their first birthday.  Then, of the survivors, roughly about another fifth-to-a-quarter died before their fifth birthday.  Then, of those survivors, about 10% died before their 20th birthday.  If you do the math, that means that every baby had roughly a coin-flip chance of living to adulthood.  The exact numbers varied by place, time, and circumstances.  But worldwide, that was the general state of affairs.




Today, worldwide about 96% of babies survive their first birthday.  Of all babies born worldwide, about 90% live to reach age 20. 

That’s a worldwide average.  In developed countries, those numbers are “over 99%” and “around 99%”.  In the most dangerous, backwards and unhappy corners of the world the numbers are much lower, but they’re still high by historical standards.  A baby born in Afghanistan or Niger or the Democratic Republic of the Congo today, in 2026?  Has better odds than a baby born in the England of George III and Pitt the Elder.

Nigeria today has an infant mortality rate about what the US had in 1946, when the Baby Boom got started.  The Boom peaked around 1952.  The infant mortality then (a bit over 3%) is about what you find in current-day Bangladesh. Pretty much the entire human race today faces a lower rate of infant mortality than that faced by our parents and grandparents. 

This doesn’t get much discussed, perhaps because it’s a “what about all the planes that land safely” kind of story.   Also, when one discusses long-term positive trends, academic friends may become restive and start murmuring about teleological errors and Whig History. 

But I think it’s really interesting.  That’s partly because it really is very good news, but also — putting my nerd hat on — because this almost certainly represents a permanent and irreversible change in the human condition.

(A pause here to define the topic: we’ve been talking about pro-natalism lately.  This isn’t that.  Today’s discussion is not about whether people should have more babies.  It’s about what’s happening with the babies that people are actually having.) 

Right, so.  Infant mortality has been falling steadily, worldwide.  Why?

Well, a lot of reasons.  Here’s one: there’s a cluster of technologies around childbirth.  And, neat thing:  many of those technologies?  Including ones that have a dramatic effect on infant mortality?  Are cheap; simple; pretty easy to make and use; and widely, almost universally available. (1)  A few examples:

— Basic medical equipment.  Stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, thermometer, scalpel, forceps… all of those are simple devices that are available everywhere. Hypodermics are ubiquitous and very, very cheap.  Reliable pulse oximeters are $10 on Amazon.  
— Antisepsis.  You can do basic antisepsis with alcohol.  Alcohol is everywhere.  (Reasonably pure alcohol solutions are a late medieval technology.)  
— Antibiotics.  A bunch of different antibiotics are very cheap, and several are surprisingly easy to produce.  All the antibiotics that end in -cillin, for instance?  Those can literally be made by a careful high school student in a cellar.  Even the poorest developing country can make them (though as a practical matter, it’s usually cheaper and easier to import). (2)  
— A bag-and-valve mask, with oxygen.  B&V masks are everywhere; decent quality reusable ones are less than $50.  Bottling oxygen, also very widely available — it’s 19th century technology.  (Really.  Oxygen was first bottled in 1868, and bottled oxygen was fist used in medicine in 1885.)
— The germ theory of disease.  Just knowing that microbes cause infection, and can be transmitted by touch, fluids, coughing, etc., is a huge leap forward.  And you can implement that with things like masks and disposable gloves that, say it again, are dirt cheap, widely available, and easily made anywhere.  And “newborns have weak immune systems, so keep them clean and away from sick people” — we didn’t know that a couple of hundred years ago!  But now we do know it, and we’re not going to un-know it.
— And of course, basic education in maternal health and childbirth.  Basically, training midwives up to a certain standard.  To grossly oversimplify, most of the world is already doing this.  The certification standards in developed countries are pretty high (some years of experience plus several years of higher ed), but that’s almost certainly overkill.  It turns out that while advanced education is nice to have, you can get significant reductions in infant mortality from even very basic education and training.

(1) There’s also an intermediate class of childbirth-related technologies that are not simple in the sense that they could be locally manufactured in a developing country, but that are nevertheless cheap and widely available. Ultrasound machines, for instance, are moderately complex bits of tech that are manufactured mostly in wealthy and middle-income countries.  But you can buy a Chinese-made portable ultrasound scanner for a few thousand dollars, well within the reach of a hospital or clinic in a developing country.  Similarly, oxytocin — a very useful tool for inducing labor, empowering contractions, and reducing uterine bleeding — requires a somewhat delicate solid-state chemical synthesis, and so is produced in only a dozen or so countries.  But it’s available everywhere, worldwide. (3)

(2)  These days, developing countries have a lot more industry than you might think.  To give one example, Uganda currently has a couple of million college graduates, a modest but real local chemical industry, and several large pharmaceutical factories.  (I visited a couple of them back in my former career.)  The money may be South Asian, the equipment may be Chinese, but the technical staff are almost entirely Ugandans, and they know their stuff.  I’m not sure if they currently produce antibiotics or oxytocin, but there’s no question that they could if they wanted to.

(3)  Although — deep cut nerd here — oxytocin was first used medically in 1909, while its modern synthesis wasn’t developed until around 1960.  Where did medical oxytocin come from, for those fifty years?  From slaughterhouses.  Oxytocin can be extracted from the pituitary glands of mammals.  We use the synthetic stuff because it’s purer and safer, but we could still get it from the local meat packer.

So:  because these technologies are cheap, simple, robust, useful, and very widely distributed, their uptake and use is likely to be permanent.  It’s very hard to imagine a global catastrophe that would eliminate the ability to distill alcohol or the knowledge that microbes cause disease.  In order to go back to premodern levels of infant mortality, we would literally have to bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age.  

Okay, that’s the technological side.  What about the political / social aspect?

Well, it turns out that keeping babies alive is a very popular policy.  So much so that even truly corrupt and extractive regimes, overseeing unpleasantly patriarchal societies, will usually invest some resources in maternal and infant health.  Like, the infant mortality rate in the Islamic Republic of Iran?  Currently about 1/10 of what it was when the Islamic Republic was founded back in 1979.

And if your leadership is obsessed with National Greatness, well, healthy babies make sense there too. (4)

(4)  Authoritarian and blood-and-soil regimes tend to converge on iconography of a happy / contented mother with a healthy baby (with baby usually either ungendered or male).

Which is very obnoxious, but healthy babies?  Still a good thing anyway!  

And creepy propaganda aside, maternal and child health makes economic sense too.  From a cold blooded fiscal /economic POV, modest investments in basic maternal and infant health?  Can give ridiculously large payoffs down the line.  

And then of course, healthy babies are better than sick or dead babies.  Isn’t that pretty close to a moral absolute?  The advances that have reduced infant mortality have eliminated millions and millions of heartbreaks and tragedies, saving countless human lives.  You have to work pretty hard (4) to not see that as a vast and great Good Thing.

(4)  Although I’ve seen people try.

The limited available evidence suggests that hunter-gatherers and human societies of the deep past also had very high infant, child, and pre-adult mortality.  Whether it was as bad as premodern agricultural societies is less clear, but it was definitely much worse than pretty much anywhere in the modern world.  A baby born in Somalia today almost certainly has much better odds than a baby born into some Paleolithic tribe of wanderers.

So, to loop it back: the case for this being a permanent and irreversible change in the human condition is pretty strong.  And I’d suggest that this has implications for everything from current political economics to the long-term evolutionary future of humanity.

But as noted, for some reason it doesn’t get much talked about.  It’s a huge departure from the historical norm that just seems to be… taken for granted.

Some of this is because in the developed world it’s old news (although not /that/ old — again, as recently as the 1940s, the US had infant mortality rates worse than much of the developing world today).  And today it’s happening in the developing world, and who really cares about good news from Senegal or Laos?  Also, even though it affects everyone and everything, issues relating to childbirth and infancy are hard-coded as Woman Stuff.

Oh, and it annoys people who want to be relentlessly negative about the future.

Which, whatever, guys.

But anyway.  Permanent and irreversible change in the human condition — for the better.  

Buckle up. There is more, and it is worse than you think.

Donald Trump, as he does almost daily, had reporters in the Oval Office today and answered a question saying “there’s nothing on me” in the Epstein files and claimed that “they found that Jeffrey Epstein and a sleazebag writer named Michael Wolff were conspiring against Donald Trump to lose the election.”

Elsewhere, it emerged that in the three million pages of files released by the Department of Justice, there are 38,000 mentions of Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin’s name appears 1,056 times.

There is an FBI report of an interview with a woman who claimed that Trump raped her 35 years ago when she was underage. There are repeated references to Trump’s friendship with Epstein. There are messages between Melania and Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. As I reported yesterday, the files contain the names of prominent men like Howard Lutnick and Woody Allen and Larry Summers and others. They establish that each of these men had relationships with Epstein. There are details, such as visits to Epstein’s notorious island and trips on his jet aircraft, which was referred to as the “Lolita Express.”

However, there is no proof about any of them, no proof about Donald Trump, no proof that their friendship with the notorious and eventually convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein included committing sexual assault or rape of underage girls.

That’s the problem with the Epstein files. There isn’t any proof. They reveal tons of disgusting material about Epstein himself and the prominent men with whom he surrounded himself, but there is, as at least one report noted, “no smoking gun.”

So, let’s discuss what “proof” is. In the context of Donald Trump, we already know that proof does not matter. Maybe the truest statement Trump ever made was his “joke” in 2016 just before the Iowa caucuses: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” After ten long years of this asshole, I think we can all agree that his statement was absolutely correct. If it were to emerge that there is cellphone video of Trump carrying out the murder of a person in the middle of Fifth Avenue, his supporters would claim that it is fake news, a fake video, that it doesn’t show what it clearly shows.

“Proof” never really had any meaning with Trump. He is functionally immune from proof of wrongdoing. The Supreme Court confirmed and compounded that fact with its decision making him legally immune from prosecution for any action he takes as president. That is why he and his sons are out there making “deals” involving their crypto firm with Gulf state potentates that have, according to reports, yielded them some $4 billion in profits so far. There is nothing that can be done by anyone, anytime, anywhere that would get in the way of Trump’s rampant corruption.

But proof and truth are separate things. It is true that Trump and his sons and Steve Witkoff and his family made a deal with Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who manages the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates, that yielded a $187 million gain for the Trump family through the Trump/Witkoff crypto business, World Liberty Financial, with $31 million going to the Witkoff family. But it is not proof of corruption, because according to the Supreme Court, Trump cannot commit any corrupt act, and anyone associated with him can be assured that they will not be prosecuted for corruption, because Trump has the power to pardon them, thus nullifying the entire concept of corruption.

How can something that is true not be proof of a crime or legal misbehavior? Easy. It is shown in pages from the Epstein files that were generated by the prestigious law firm, Kirkland Ellis, and signed by the prominent – for all kinds of reasons – Kenneth Starr, who was one of Epstein’s lawyers. Starr and Epstein’s other lawyer, Jay Lefkowitz, sent a letter to the former U.S. Attorney for southern Florida, Alexander Acosta, arguing that Epstein should not be indicted for crimes committed against underage girls. We know that the letter from Kirkland Ellis was successful, because Acosta signed a non-prosecution deal with Epstein that got him off federal charges and left him facing lesser charges by the state of Florida that he pleaded guilty to. We know that this deal was corrupt. Trump paid off Acosta for helping his friend Epstein in 2007 by appointing Acosta Secretary of Labor in 2017, a position in which he served until 2019, when the federal indictment of Epstein in New York forced Acosta to resign his position as Labor Secretary.

All this is fascinating by itself in the way it shows how powerful men, in this case, Epstein, Trump, Acosta, Starr, and Lefkowitz, conspired to fix the case against Epstein and let him off with a slap-on-the-wrist conviction and no real prison time. But it’s how it was done that goes to the heart of how proof and truth are corrupted by lies.

One of the things Epstein was investigated for was “inducement,” which in his case was convincing underage girls to engage in acts of prostitution. The letter from Kirkland Ellis goes into great detail to convince Acosta that Epstein could not have “induced” girls to engage in illegal sexual acts with adult men because (1) they lied about their ages to Epstein, and (2) the acts they carried out on men were consensual.

Oh, boy. It’s hard to even grasp that these men, Starr and Lefkowitz, could go to sleep at night having written the garbage they wrote to Acosta, just as it is hard to believe that Acosta could get to sleep having accepted their arguments.

Reading the pages as they are reproduced in the Epstein files is…there is no other word for it…incredible. Under the subheading, “No Sexual Contact,” the letter quotes one of the underage girl’s sworn statement about Epstein: “So I willingly the first time took off my top when I gave him a massage and nothing more than that.” Further down, the same underage girl says, “I would wear panties. Willingly one time because we were making jokes and everything and willingly one time I had, yes, I was [blacked out] but I was fine with it.”

This is from an underage girl, interviewed by the FBI, and here statements were being used to absolve Epstein of having “induced” her to commit a crime. Elsewhere in the letter, she quoted describing “bringing him, I don’t know, maybe 30 girls. It was all about money to me at the time.” She describes telling the other “girls” to lie to Epstein about their ages. She states, “Like I said, I went [blacked out] for him one time. But the other girls, they practically were topless and that’s all that they were willing to do.”

Here is the conclusion made by Kenneth Starr and Jay Lefkowitz after the above quotes and many others, all of them about the underage girl discussed in the letter:

“In sum, [blacked out] testimony clearly shows that she is not a victim.”

Not a victim.

Here is the conclusion Starr and Lefkowitz provided to Acosta, with which he apparently agreed: “We believe — and know you share our belief that citizens should he treated alike regardless of wealth or status when it comes to criminal justice. We ask for nothing more of your treatment of Mr. Epstein than that he be treated as would any other citizen of Palm Beach under similar circumstances. Mr. Epstein should not be charged with offenses to which his conduct does not apply.”

The underage girl’s testimony about providing Epstein with other girls and being paid for it, about underage girls wearing “panties” and going “topless” while giving “massages” was not enough proof for Acosta to prosecute Jeffrey Epstein.

What we know about Epstein, what we know about Trump, what we know about their friendship from photographs and from everything that has been written about these two men, and their friends, and their associates, may be true, but it is not proof.

Think about this for a moment. Try to imagine being a 15 or 16 year old girl being topless and standing over the prone figures of Epstein or Summers or Trump or any of the rest of them and giving them a “massage.”

That may be evidence of the gross and misshapen moral sensibility, the utter absence of knowing the difference between what is right and what is wrong, by these men, but it is not proof of anything.

That is what Trump and the rest of them want us to believe. That is why “there is nothing on me” is a lie, and yet when it comes to the law, it is true. Proof is neither truth nor evidence of a lie. It is legal and cold and naked. It is what they will deploy to defend the murderers of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Cellphones and the body cameras they promised today will be issued to ICE agents won’t save us.

We may see with our eyes and hear with our ears and be able to distinguish between right and wrong, but that is not much more than evidence of being human. It may be true, but it’s not proof.

Leave a comment

Share

Give a gift subscription