Wednesday, September 23, 2020


SCOTUS Showdown: A Case for Nominating Barbara Lagoa

It has got to be Lagoa. Collins and Murkowsi are the weak links in the Senate. Both have said they will not vote for any candidate at this juncture. But will they be able to resist voting against an Hispanic woman? It would look very bad for them. And Lagoa is Cuban so should be pretty solidly conservative. And even Leftists might find it hard to oppose a woman

The alternative is Amy Coney Barrett, who is solidly against the baby killers so will attract real fury from the Left. Leftists love deaths — of others. So where Collins and Murkowski might relent and vote for Lagoa, they will not have the fortitude to stand up for Barrett and be forever branded as pro-abortion.

Not that Murkowski and Collins are totally needed. Lagoa could still get through with the aid of Pence’s casting vote

President Trump will select a Supreme Court nominee to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg within a matter of days. We know that it will be a woman. And based on multiple reports, the top two potential finalists are Judge Amy Coney Barrett of the Seventh Circuit, and Judge Barbara Lagoa of the Eleventh Circuit. A law professor at Notre Dame, Barrett was confirmed 55-43 (nearly exactly along party lines) to her current post in the fall of 2017, following a contentious process. To be clear, I believe Barrett is a brilliant and capable jurist and would be thrilled if President Trump picks her. She’s young (48), smart, and rock solid. She is the frontrunner for good reason.

That being said, it’s simply a reality that this nomination will be the subject of a pitched battle no matter who is named. And against that backdrop, I am coming around to the view that Judge Lagoa might be the more strategically savvy choice under the present circumstances — and should at least get a very serious look for the top spot on the list. Consider:

(1) Lagoa’s credentials are strong. Like Justice Ginsburg, she’s a graduate of Columbia University’s law school. She began her career on the bench as a lower court judge in Florida starting in 2006 (appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush) after serving as an Assistant US Attorney. She was elevated to the Florida Supreme Court by Gov. Ron DeSantis (who takes the issue of the courts very seriously) in January 2019, serving in that capacity for most of the year, until she was plucked from the state bench by Trump. The president nominated her for the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Her resume practically screams “well qualified” — which is how she was unanimously rated by the left-leaning American Bar Association.

(2) Her personal story is also compelling, which is — like it or not — a relevant factor in an era of identity-focused politics. Lagoa is the daughter of Cuban-Americans who fled their homeland during the Communist revolution. She is young (she’ll turn 53 the day before the November election), the mother of three daughters, and is said to have a vivacious personality. If confirmed, this “wise Latina” would be the second-ever Hispanic member of the Supreme Court and only the fifth woman (the latter would also be true of Barrett). Democrats are likely to be extremely aggressive in opposing this nominee (just look at their outrageous conduct during the Kavanaugh nomination), but the optics of beating up on a Latina would be less than ideal — especially at a moment when Democrats are anxiously watching President Trump over-perform among Latino voters in the polls.

(3) Did I mention she’s a Floridian? I’ve heard that state is a pretty important one.

(4) Chuck Schumer famously once said, “I always use the word ‘extreme'” to discredit conservative ideas or nominees. Democrats will undoubtedly play that card against whomever Trump taps for this seat, but their go-to moniker would ring especially hollow if deployed against Lagoa. Why? She was overwhelmingly confirmed to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals late last year. The final tally was 80-15 in favor. Senate Democrats voted to confirm her by nearly a two-to-one margin. The following Democratic members of the judiciary committee supported her confirmation: Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Chris Coons (D-DE), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Pat Leahy (D-VT), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). That’s right, the four most senior Democrats on the committee voted Yea, as did Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate. The only Democratic member of the committee who voted against her was Mazie Hirono (several others who were busy running for president did not vote). Also, every GOP senator voted in the affirmative, including Collins and Murkowski. Democrats will stomp their feet and say “but the Supreme Court is different!” Fine. But it’s awfully hard to frame a nominee as dangerously radical and extreme when a large majority of your own party recently backed her confirmation to another powerful federal court. This is a serious asset for Lagoa. Her nomination could be framed as a more consensus and ‘moderate’ pick, which could raise the odds of a successful confirmation under difficult, high-pressure conditions.

(5) A conservative source who’s long known Lagoa attests that her conservative credentials are strong, despite a relatively thin record on hot-button cases. Conservatives often fear David Souter-style betrayals, and for good reason. This source says there is “zero chance” Lagoa, whom the source likens to Clarence Thomas, is a risk to become an Anthony Kennedy, let alone a Souter. She is said to have won the confidence of several very strong conservatives who are very familiar with her work. But let’s say for the sake of argument that she could end up becoming, say, a John Roberts, who disappoints conservatives, sometimes seriously, on occasion (I have no reason to believe this would be the case, and it merits a mention that Lagoa has been involved with the Federalist Society for years). That would still be an immense ideological upgrade from Justice Ginsburg. Which is to say, I’m less fixated than I typically would be on the demonstrable philosophical bona fides of this particular nominee at this particular moment in time. Republicans will need to thread a needle, given the timing of this vacancy. A huge strategic consideration, under these conditions, must be making opposition as difficult as possible. A Barbara Lagoa nomination could present some real optics landmines for Democrats, and it would align with the Trump campaign’s aggressive courtship of voters of color at the Republicans’ August convention. In other words, it would play to Trump’s instincts and strategy.

I’d like to see more assurances about the underpinnings and consistency of her judicial philosophy (I’ve spoken to some plugged-in conservatives I trust who at least have questions about the depth of her commitment to conservative jurisprudence) — and it’s especially crucial that she’s totally buttoned up from a vetting perspective. Yes, she just passed through a very recent confirmation process with flying colors (some of the conservative doubters ask why she received 80 votes, including the support of some extremely liberal Senators). But SCOTUS is a different beast with different stakes. Just ask Justice Kavanaugh. But time is of the essence. If Lagoa is determined to be a sufficiently vetted and conservative jurist, I believe she may be an ideal candidate for the position, in light of all the emotionally-charged and politically-fraught dynamics at play. And if not ideal, she’s at least worthy of a very, very serious look.

SOURCE

Possible AI futures

A Harvard Business School presentation on artificial intelligence by Professors Karim Lakhani and Marco Iansiti this week was fascinating but creepy. While the technology is empowering numerous new businesses, most of those businesses seem to be in China. Gradually, as the capabilities of artificial intelligence combined with Big Data sank in, I came to a chilling realization that in the wrong hands, the technology may be very dangerous indeed. We had better make sure our defenses are raised against this possibility.

The presenters gave a number of examples of AI in action, which certainly stimulated thought. The first example was a reproduction Rembrandt painting – they loaded all the existing Rembrandts into a computer and asked the AI algorithm to produce a Rembrandt of a 30-40-year-old man, and it produced a picture that was quite convincing. However, I’m no art expert, but I’m not sure the AI result was definitively a Rembrandt – it was a little flat.

That is however not surprising; the great man himself employed a studio full of assistants to finish his paintings and add the easy bits. Hence if you load all the Rembrandts into a computer, you will have work that is part-Rembrandt, part “school of.” This painting was definitely “school of” and might have been “Rembrandt on a bad day” but you certainly wouldn’t have rated it as a top-quality Rembrandt masterpiece. Similarly, the little AI-Mozart that I have heard never sounds like the best Mozart, but more like some random 18th Century tiddly-pom.

The second AI example they gave was a Chinese insurance company’s program for counting pigs. The insurance company provides farm insurance on some large percentage of China’s 850 million pigs, and naturally wants to check how many pigs are in a particular farm, and whether the same pigs are being shuttled from farm to farm to defraud the insurance company (I once knew someone whose family pulled that trick for EU sheep subsidies). The clever AI could not only count the pigs, but also use pig facial recognition to determine which pig was which. Clearly, this is a highly valuable capability, which can replace lots of human pig counters; being AI it has a learning capability and positive economies of scale (the more pigs it sees, the better it gets at recognizing them). Of course, China being China, one is forced to recognize that the same capability would work on people….

The final example the presentation gave was Ant Financial, the Chinese payments system that has expanded into a financial services conglomerate with 1.4 billion customers and only 10,000 employees. (Only Chinese marketing people could name a consumer-oriented financial services company after that most un-libertarian of insects. “Pussycat Financial” would at least have pretended that the company’s customers would be allowed to flourish independently, each in their own way!)

Ant Financial clearly benefits from the increasing economies of scale that AI can provide. It also uses AI algorithms and Big Data on its customers to generate new product offerings for its gigantic customer base. Naturally, AI can also be used to predict whether the customers will accept those offerings, and what might tempt customers into new offerings that might prove risky for them but carry higher commissions.

Up to a point, this is harmless and good marketing. However, it comes close to the Chinese government’s “social credit” scoring, which is used to determine who can travel, who gets particular job opportunities etc. Given Ant’s own close connections to the Chinese authorities, its data-gathering must be highly concerning for residents of China, and at least moderately concerning for the rest of us.

That is the problem with the current level of AI – “Weak AI” as it is called. It allows control-freak humans to gather information on citizens at a level never previously possible, then use that information for social control. We see it even in the United States, where the social media companies – Google, Twitter and Facebook – have ceased to be neutral platforms for the populace to express themselves, and have become machines whereby the “woke” Silicon Valley executives who run those companies can control the information allegedly free Americans send to each other.

President Trump announced last week that he would ban the purchase of the Chinese social networking services Tik-Tok and WeChat, because of their ability to collect information on U.S. consumers and in WeChat’s case on their conversations and funnel that information to the Chinese commissars. That is a useful protection, but it will last only as long as President Trump does. A Biden administration would doubtless eventually wake up to the problem, but very probably too late.

Naturally, it is less concerning that a bunch of leftist ex-hippies in Silicon Valley control the information flow than that the Chinese government has the potential to do the same. But really, it makes very little difference to me: my philosophical outlook differs almost as much from that of Silicon Valley as it does from that of Beijing, so my First Amendment rights can as easily be infringed by Silicon Valley’s gentle dweebs as by the jackbooted thugs of Beijing. In my own case, I can avoid such control by avoiding almost completely going on social media, but then, I am 70 years old and live a hermit-like existence here in Poughkeepsie. Were I 50 years younger and interested in interactions (ideally with the opposite sex, you never know!) an entire absence from social media in today’s world would seriously cramp my style, so I would surely get tempted.

“Weak” AI does not have the potential to become a Hitler itself; it is nowhere near powerful enough – it lacks the “intelligence,” artificial or otherwise. It is simply an unpleasant tool that the world’s Hitlers can make bad use of, and that therefore grants them a new and undeserved springtime. Strong AI, the Nirvana to which Silicon Valley looks forward in a decade or two, is another matter; that has the capability to become a Hitler itself, without humans needed to direct its tyranny.

I cannot help believing that the entire technological progress of the last 25 years has been misguided. Almost 20 years ago, I wrote for UPI a two-part essay “The Business of Playing God” that looked at the possibilities that then appeared to be approaching rapidly in the field of genetic engineering. Alas, spurious ethical objections to human genetic engineering and the monstrous flow of capital and talent in a different direction have prevented those possibilities from coming to fruition. I thought at that stage we were only around a decade from human cloning and from an even more exciting possibility: the artificial creation through genetic engineering of human beings with superior intelligence. Alas, those possibilities are no closer today.

Skeptics of genetic engineering, particularly in the George W. Bush administration, raised fears of the damage that could be done by genetic engineering technologies in the hands of bad guys. Yet those threats to freedom have already appeared, brought to us by AI, with no genetic engineering needed. The idea that the People’s Liberation Army could advance upon us with a regiment of human clones, or that an evil genetically engineered Einstein could destroy the world, were always far-fetched. The genetically engineered clone or genius humans would be human, subject to all the same desires and moral impulses as the rest of us, and as difficult to order about as a non-engineered army or genius.

Human intelligence is not a very useful tool for tyrants, because the humans will fight against the tyrants for their own freedom. Genetically engineered humans thus offer us a huge prospect of improving the world, allowing us to take advantage of their superior capabilities for scientific and other advances in a huge number of areas. You don’t need very many genetically engineered geniuses, provided they are geniuses.

Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, offers us few possibilities of genuine improvements to human thought, because it is not independently sentient – its Rembrandts, unlike those produced by genetically engineered humans, are mere copies of the originals. However, AI is an appallingly powerful force multiplier for those, whether Hitlers, Chinese commissars or Google geeks, who want to control our speech, thoughts and actions.

Let us therefore reverse the direction of scientific research, to produce more life-enhancing genetic engineering, and fewer Orwellian AI threats. Thereby we can produce nighttime for Hitler and the Chinese commissars, and springtime for Shakespeare, Mozart and Einstein.

SOURCE

Lone white woman viciously attacked by angry black guy

A Miami metro rider has been caught on camera viciously assaulting a lone female traveler in an unprovoked, random attack.

Joshua James King, 25, is accused of beating up Andrea Puerta, 29, during the incident on September 4, leaving her with a concussion, a broken rib and bruising.

Surveillance footage shows King walking onto the metro before launching the sustained attack on Puerta. The clip shows him kick her, slam her head and punch her more than 20 times.

Puerta told Local 10: ‘I remember that I closed my hands and I said, “stop, stop”. He did not stop. There was a moment when he said, “Sorry” and I looked at him and he punched me and after that, I don’t know what happened.’

She said of her attacker: ‘I’ve never seen him in my life. I never know him until that moment.’

After passing out, Puerta managed to get up and leave the train before calling 911, footage shows. Her attacker remained on the metro; where he is said to have assaulted two more men later that same day.

King was arrested and is now facing three counts of aggravated battery charges. He was released on a $1,500 bond on September 10 and will next appear in court on Friday.

Pictures of Puerta’s injuries show the attack left her with a black eye and a swollen jaw. ‘I don’t know how I am alive’, she added.

A GoFundMe has been set up to help Puerta pay for her medical needs, legal help and therapy bills.

It states: ‘Andrea Puerta was attacked, without provocation, by a stranger in the metro mover in Miami. The man beat her over and over, breaking her ribs, blacking her eye and giving her a concussion before beating her nearly unconscious.

The minute-long footage begins with the man, named by police as King, stepping onto the train, before walking off and then reappearing.

Without warning he then begins repeatedly punching Puerta before pushing her across the car and launching her headfirst into a chair.

Dad-of-one King was arrested later that day and is now facing three counts of aggravated battery charges.

SOURCE

Opposing feminist attacks on men in Australia and Canada

By Bettina Arndt, writing from Australia

See my thinkspot conversation last week with Diana Davison, who is working in Canada helping falsely accused men in rape cases. Diana has a group of lawyers involved in her Lighthouse Project, trying to restore due process for the accused.

Here’s the video of our discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KXs1WNZJZI. I hope you will make time to listen to our fascinating chat.

Diana has been tracking the incredibly successful efforts of feminist lawyers in Canada to tilt laws towards ‘believe-the-victim’ justice, undermining normal legal protections for accused men to ensure more rape convictions.

Diana revealed that Canadian feminists are working with law academics in the UK, USA and Australia, drafting new legislation and using the media to lean on politicians and law makers to enact laws to further this mighty enterprise. Interestingly she has evidence showing that Australia often leads the way in pushing these desired changes into law, which are then monitored by the feminists in the other countries before following suit.

We can observe this process in action in the current push for affirmative consent laws. Look at this revealing article in The Conversation, published late last year by Rachael Burgin, Executive Director of Rape and Sexual Research and Advocacy, who has conducted research on getting affirmative consent standards into law. In her article she proudly tracks the progress of this feminist endeavour to tilt the law to redefine normal sexuality so that every stage in every sexual encounter must be accompanied by constant checking for a green light.

It’s pretty funny how blatantly Burgin reveals her disappointment that Victoria’s changes to the laws haven’t come up to scratch in making it harder for alleged rapists to prove they had consent and her eagerness to bully NSW into line.

Terrible mistakes of feminism

Yet this is an endeavour which some feminist scholars now see as one of the “terrible mistakes” of the otherwise laudable project of entrenching feminist power.

In our conversation Diana recommended a powerful new book, Governance Feminism which offers a very frank assessment of the prevailing culture where feminists “walk the halls of power.”

“One can get a job in the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Criminal Court, the local prosecutors office and the child welfare bureaucracy for espousing various strands of feminism,” say Janet Halley and co-authors in their introduction. The authors see this as cause for celebration yet are refreshingly willing to properly examine who wins and who loses from feminism in governance.

There’s a brilliant chapter by the late London School of Economics law professor Helen Reece, which exposes the way feminists have found their way into the Crown Prosecution Service, or Judicial Training Board, allegedly not to propagate feminist propaganda but simply to instruct lawyers and judges on how to avoid “rape myths.”

Reece writes most entertainingly about an incident where UK television presenter Judy Finnigan dared to suggest on a TV discussion show that a rape involving professional footballer Ched Evans having sex with a woman too drunk to consent was not the most heinous form of rape.

Finnigan’s words: “The rape, and I am not, please, by any means, er minimizing any kind of rape, but the rape was not violent. He didn’t cause any bodily harm to the person. It was unpleasant, in a hot room, I believe, and she was, she had far too much to drink. And you know, that is reprehensible, but he has been convicted and he has served his time.”

Reece dissects the extraordinary outrage that greeted this remark, with the media running the “rape is rape” narrative denying that some rapes are more serious than others, and Finnigan eventually forced to apologise after being firmly told, “You can’t say that.” It’s a valuable expose of the censorship that now controls all public discourse on such matters.

Reece is also frank about flaws in the affirmative consent argument: “The problem is some women do like to indicate their consent to sex through subtle aspects of their behaviour.”

Young women, as well as young men, need to be taught to see consensual sex more responsibly, Reece argues. She suggests this might require “challenging the normative acceptance of entering into sexual relations with partners one hardly knows, of seeing alcohol as an integral part of a sexual encounter and misleading the partner about one’s sexual intentions.”

There’s much more of interest in this challenging book but useful indeed to see eminent scholars acknowledging that the feminist success in gaining power has come at considerable costs for society.

Email from Bettina Arndt: newsletter@bettinaarndt.com.au

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American “liberals” often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America’s educational system — particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if “liberals” had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. Email me (John Ray) here.
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