Everyday Erinyes #378

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 3:12 pm Politics

Jul 092023

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

We’ve talked a lot here about Articficial Intelligence (AI), in connection with things like facial recognition errors and deep-fake videos. But reading thisarticle, I realized we have barely scratched the surface. You’ll see what I mean as this article talks about – I want to say morality, but we can also call it priorities. Imagine, for instance, as the author does, an AI app behaving like Chris Christie during Bridgegate (over a reservation at a restaurant).
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AI is an existential threat – just not the way you think

AI isn’t likely to enslave humanity, but it could take over many aspects of our lives.
elenabs/iStock via Getty Images

Nir Eisikovits, UMass Boston

The rise of ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence systems has been accompanied by a sharp increase in anxiety about AI. For the past few months, executives and AI safety researchers have been offering predictions, dubbed “P(doom),” about the probability that AI will bring about a large-scale catastrophe.

Worries peaked in May 2023 when the nonprofit research and advocacy organization Center for AI Safety released a one-sentence statement: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” The statement was signed by many key players in the field, including the leaders of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, as well as two of the so-called “godfathers” of AI: Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio.

You might ask how such existential fears are supposed to play out. One famous scenario is the “paper clip maximizer” thought experiment articulated by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. The idea is that an AI system tasked with producing as many paper clips as possible might go to extraordinary lengths to find raw materials, like destroying factories and causing car accidents.

A less resource-intensive variation has an AI tasked with procuring a reservation to a popular restaurant shutting down cellular networks and traffic lights in order to prevent other patrons from getting a table.

Office supplies or dinner, the basic idea is the same: AI is fast becoming an alien intelligence, good at accomplishing goals but dangerous because it won’t necessarily align with the moral values of its creators. And, in its most extreme version, this argument morphs into explicit anxieties about AIs enslaving or destroying the human race.

A paper clip-making AI runs amok is one variant of the AI apocalypse scenario.

Actual harm

In the past few years, my colleagues and I at UMass Boston’s Applied Ethics Center have been studying the impact of engagement with AI on people’s understanding of themselves, and I believe these catastrophic anxieties are overblown and misdirected.

Yes, AI’s ability to create convincing deep-fake video and audio is frightening, and it can be abused by people with bad intent. In fact, that is already happening: Russian operatives likely attempted to embarrass Kremlin critic Bill Browder by ensnaring him in a conversation with an avatar for former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Cybercriminals have been using AI voice cloning for a variety of crimes – from high-tech heists to ordinary scams.

AI decision-making systems that offer loan approval and hiring recommendations carry the risk of algorithmic bias, since the training data and decision models they run on reflect long-standing social prejudices.

These are big problems, and they require the attention of policymakers. But they have been around for a while, and they are hardly cataclysmic.

Not in the same league

The statement from the Center for AI Safety lumped AI in with pandemics and nuclear weapons as a major risk to civilization. There are problems with that comparison. COVID-19 resulted in almost 7 million deaths worldwide, brought on a massive and continuing mental health crisis and created economic challenges, including chronic supply chain shortages and runaway inflation.

Nuclear weapons probably killed more than 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, claimed many more lives from cancer in the years that followed, generated decades of profound anxiety during the Cold War and brought the world to the brink of annihilation during the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962. They have also changed the calculations of national leaders on how to respond to international aggression, as currently playing out with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

AI is simply nowhere near gaining the ability to do this kind of damage. The paper clip scenario and others like it are science fiction. Existing AI applications execute specific tasks rather than making broad judgments. The technology is far from being able to decide on and then plan out the goals and subordinate goals necessary for shutting down traffic in order to get you a seat in a restaurant, or blowing up a car factory in order to satisfy your itch for paper clips.

Not only does the technology lack the complicated capacity for multilayer judgment that’s involved in these scenarios, it also does not have autonomous access to sufficient parts of our critical infrastructure to start causing that kind of damage.

What it means to be human

Actually, there is an existential danger inherent in using AI, but that risk is existential in the philosophical rather than apocalyptic sense. AI in its current form can alter the way people view themselves. It can degrade abilities and experiences that people consider essential to being human.

a robot hand points to one of four photographs on a shiny black surface — As algorithms take over many decisions, such as hiring, people could gradually lose the capacity to make them.
AndreyPopov/iStock via Getty Images

For example, humans are judgment-making creatures. People rationally weigh particulars and make daily judgment calls at work and during leisure time about whom to hire, who should get a loan, what to watch and so on. But more and more of these judgments are being automated and farmed out to algorithms. As that happens, the world won’t end. But people will gradually lose the capacity to make these judgments themselves. The fewer of them people make, the worse they are likely to become at making them.

Or consider the role of chance in people’s lives. Humans value serendipitous encounters: coming across a place, person or activity by accident, being drawn into it and retrospectively appreciating the role accident played in these meaningful finds. But the role of algorithmic recommendation engines is to reduce that kind of serendipity and replace it with planning and prediction.

Finally, consider ChatGPT’s writing capabilities. The technology is in the process of eliminating the role of writing assignments in higher education. If it does, educators will lose a key tool for teaching students how to think critically.

Not dead but diminished

So, no, AI won’t blow up the world. But the increasingly uncritical embrace of it, in a variety of narrow contexts, means the gradual erosion of some of humans’ most important skills. Algorithms are already undermining people’s capacity to make judgments, enjoy serendipitous encounters and hone critical thinking.

The human species will survive such losses. But our way of existing will be impoverished in the process. The fantastic anxieties around the coming AI cataclysm, singularity, Skynet, or however you might think of it, obscure these more subtle costs. Recall T.S. Eliot’s famous closing lines of “The Hollow Men”: “This is the way the world ends,” he wrote, “not with a bang but a whimper.”

Nir Eisikovits, Professor of Philosophy and Director, Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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AMT, I’m pretty sure that it’s possible to program solid priorites into AI, but I’m a lot less sure that it’s possible to make those prorities resemble any kind of what I for one would call morals. This has me thinking about the art form known as “tragedy.” We call it a tragedy today when, for instance, there is a mass shooting. But an incident such as that would never pass the literary smell test. A tragedy demands a tragic hero (or heroine) who is not just a good person, but a great person, who however has a “tragic flaw” which leads him or her to create massive chaos and destruction. The classic example is MacBeth, who was a great and patriotic general (not that we ever see that MacBeth, but we do see a little evidence of it in the promotion he receives) who however had the tragic flaw of ambition, and look what happened.

This article causes me to fear that any given AI app could turn out to be a tragic hero, unless the makers consider that up front and work to prevent it. And, even then, mistakes happen.

The Furies and I will be back.

Everyday Erinyes #377

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 5:02 pm Politics

Jul 022023

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

I suspect anyone who reads here could write a column on how horrible the SuprememCourt’s overturning of affitmative action is, and, while those columns would differ in phrasing, they would all make many of the same points. So I’m not going to go there. In case anyone is wondering why military academies were expempted, I’m pretty sure it’s because the military has (accurately) presented diversity as a military preparedness issue long enough and hard enough that even this SCOTUS did not feel comfortable going against it.
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Military academies can still consider race in admissions, but the rest of the nation’s colleges and universities cannot, court rules

A person protests outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on June 29, 2023.
AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

Kristine Bowman, Michigan State University; Kimberly Robinson, University of Virginia, and Vinay Harpalani, University of New Mexico

In a 6-3 ruling on Thursday, June 29, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the use of race in college admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, outlawing the use of race in college admissions in general. The Conversation reached out to three legal scholars to explain what the decision means for students, colleges and universities, and ultimately the nation’s future.

Kimberly Robinson, Professor of Law at the University of Virginia

Writing for the majority in a case that bans affirmative action in college admissions, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that such programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” that goes against the Constitution.

The research, however, shows that the ban could potentially harm many college students and ultimately the United States. The reason this can be said with certainty is because in states where affirmative action has been banned, such as California and Michigan, many selective state colleges and universities have struggled to maintain the student body diversity that existed before affirmative action was banned.

Robust research shows how students who engage with students from different racial backgrounds experience educational benefits, such as cognitive growth and development and creating new ideas. For those reasons, a substantial decline in enrollment for underrepresented minority students carries many repercussions.

It means, for instance, that many students at selective colleges will have far fewer opportunities to learn from and interact with students from different racial backgrounds.

The nation’s elite colleges, such as Harvard and the University of North Carolina, educate a disproportionately high share of America’s leaders. Those who don’t attend these selective schools are dramatically less likely to complete a graduate or professional program. This is because these selective schools carry certain advantages. For instance, students who attend them are statistically more likely to graduate and be admitted to professional and graduate programs.

That means for students from underrepresented groups who don’t get into selective colleges, the chances of getting an advanced degree – which often paves the way to leadership positions – will be even lower.

The decision may also affect the workplace. Research shows that in states that eliminated affirmative action, meaningful drops in workplace diversity took place. Asian and African American women and Hispanic men experienced the most significant declines.

These shifts in elite college enrollment, leadership and workplaces will weaken long-standing efforts to dismantle the nation’s segregationist past and the privilege that this segregationist past affords to wealth and whiteness.

To help mitigate these potential harms, selective colleges will have to devote their attention to limiting what I believe are the decision’s harmful impacts and reaffirming their commitment to diverse student bodies through all lawful means.

Kristine Bowman, Professor of Law and Education Policy, Michigan State University

Protestors holding posters saying, 'Black Lives Matter' and 'Defend Diversity.' — People protest outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on June 29, 2023.
AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

In striking down race-conscious admissions practices, the Supreme Court overturns the court’s 1978 decision that held that race-conscious admissions were constitutional.

This reversal was not unexpected, but it will have profound implications for building and maintaining diverse and inclusive colleges and universities, particularly among selective institutions. The most effective way to enroll a diverse student body – and achieve the educational and social benefits that come with it – is to consider race as a factor in admissions. In the 10 states that have had affirmative action bans in admissions, diversity in selective institutions has declined.
This remained true even as alternative strategies were employed to achieve racial diversity, such as targeting recruitment efforts and focusing more on socioeconomic status diversity.

Although the court does not say outright that institutions cannot pursue diversity, it is not clear what diversity-related goals, if any, could constitutionally support race-conscious admissions. The court states that the benefits of diversity that Harvard and UNC articulate are not sufficiently “measurable,” “focused,” “concrete” or “coherent.” “How many fewer leaders Harvard would create without racial preferences, or how much poorer the education at Harvard would be, are inquiries no court could resolve,” the court wrote.

And yet, as Justice Sotomayor’s dissent highlights, the majority also says that race-conscious admissions with a “focus on numbers” or particular “numerical commitments” are also unconstitutional.

The opinion did not go as far as it could have in restricting the consideration of race. Institutions can still consider what a student’s comments about their racialized experiences reveal about their characteristics, such as “courage,” “determination” or “leadership.”

This provides a way for institutions to consider how race has impacted a student’s life. Although this unfairly places the burden on students of color to write about their racialized experience, it is arguably lighter than the burden that would have been borne if the court had attempted to prohibit consideration of such experiences.

Furthermore, efforts to pursue diversity through other means remain lawful. These alternative means include increasing attention to socioeconomic status, making campus communities more inclusive. It also involves checking whether students are passing classes and graduating at the same rate regardless of race.

Research hasn’t shown that these efforts will result in as much diversity at selective colleges as race-conscious college admissions. These efforts, however, now stand as a critical way forward to keep America’s elite colleges and universities diverse.

Vinay Harpalani, Associate Professor of Law, University of New Mexico

Although the court struck down the use of race in college admissions – as predicted by many experts and observers – the court left room for one narrow exception.

The majority opinion stated in a brief footnote that its ruling does not apply to race-conscious admissions at the nation’s military academies, such as West Point or the Naval Academy.

This issue had come up at oral arguments. When articulating the U.S. government’s position, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar raised the point that the military may have compelling interests beyond those that universities have. Specifically, the U.S. government argued that a racially diverse military officer corps was necessary for national security. In response, Chief Justice Roberts briefly noted the possibility of a military academy exception. This was not lost in his ruling.

The majority opinion stated that there could be “potentially distinct interests that the military academies may present.” Because the academies were not parties to these cases, the court did not directly address this issue and left it unsettled.

This was not the first time that the military influenced the court’s view of race-conscious admissions. Twenty years ago, national security interests played a significant role in the majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger.

Citing the amicus brief of former military leaders, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s majority opinion in the Grutter case noted that diverse military leadership was “essential to the military’s ability to fulfill its principle mission to provide national security.” She found that “[i]t requires only a small step from this analysis to conclude that our country’s other most selective institutions must remain both diverse and selective.”

In its latest rulings, the court left alone O’Connor’s claim that diverse military leadership is essential to national security, but it soundly rejected her view that diversity can justify race-conscious admissions at the nation’s colleges and universities.

The military is not the only place where the court has noted that security interests can justify use of race. The court also cited a 2005 ruling, Johnson v. California, where the justices held that prison officials could temporarily segregate prisoners by race to prevent violence.

It seems that the court is willing to uphold use of race when government power is at stake – as with the military and law enforcement. But it will not do so for the education of America’s citizenry.

Kristine Bowman, Professor of Law and Education Policy, Michigan State University; Kimberly Robinson, Professor of Law, Professor of Law, Education and Public Policy, University of Virginia, and Vinay Harpalani, Associate Professor of Law and Henry Weihofen Professor, University of New Mexico

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, since this decision, I have been thinking about the Biblical “mark of Cain,” which southern white Protestants (and other whites) decided must mean black skin, and, because it came with a curse, they (whites) were justified in enslaving them (blacks.) All that this proves is that southern white Protestants (and other whites) could neither read nor think. Taking the “read” part first, the curse attached to Cain was not a curse on him and/or his descendants. It was a curse on anyone not of his descent who would harm him or his descendants in any way, and it threatend them with seven times any evil they inflicted to be in turn inflicted on them. I wonder how the whites managed to miss that little point. But in addition to that, Seth, Adam and Eve’s third son, was the ancestor of Noah – which means that no descendant of Cain could possibly have survived the flood.

My personal opinion is that, if (I say IF) there were such a thing as the mark of Cain and people living today who carried it, it would make a lot more sense for it to be “white” skin. We – or at least far too many of us – seem to have the murdering gene in our DNA. And we seem to get away with it way too easily, while at the same time society is inflicting seven-fold or more evil on people without white skin who just mildly annoy us.

The Furies and I will be back.

Everyday Erinyes #376

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 12:39 pm Politics

Jun 252023

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Deterrence as a means to encourage people to obey laws is greatly overrated. Sure, it works on sane people (using the term colloquially – I am well aware that criminality is not in the DSM), but those are the people who are inclined to obey the law anyway. The classic example of this is pickpockets. Back in the day, when hanging was the punishment for picking pockets, public hangings of pickpockets were the equivalent of Black Friday for the pickpockets’ guild. And they never forgot to have at least one of them shout “Beware of pickpockets!” so that all the gentlemen would reflexively tap their wallet pockets, thus eliminating guesswork for the guild. It would appear they believed that getting caught was something that always happened to someone else. But that does not mean that it’s not a good idea to lock up those who are politically violent. Indeed, at the very least, it takes them out of circulation and makes us safer for that amount of time. And it may help to deter those who are less delusional. Indeed, if it doesn’t, probably nothing will.
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How pardoning extremists undermines the rule of law

Former President Donald Trump has said he may pardon recently convicted leaders of the Proud Boys. Here, Proud Boys members protest in Salem, Ore., on Jan. 8, 2022.
Mathieu Lewis-Rolland / AFP via Getty Images

Michael H. Becker, American University

In the past 10 years, there has been an increase in far-right political violence in the United States. While scholars have pointed to several possible reasons – and often, combinations of explanations – the trend is clear.

This violence has coincided with the growing influence of far-right state and federal political candidates, who collectively have excited and mobilized extremist communities both online and in person.

In response, federal and state law enforcement officials have focused increasing attention on these movements with the hope of deterring political violence and lowering the risk of domestic extremism. Many who participated in political violence – including Cesar Sayoc, who sent pipe bombs to Democratic officials, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio – have faced arrest, prosecution and, in some cases, jail or prison sentences.

At the same time, a number of conservative elected officials and politicians have publicly expressed interest in pardoning some of these same people. I am a scholar who studies the individuals, groups and movements that use political violence. Research shows that this use of the pardon power can damage the rule of law in the United States. It undermines one of the tools against violence that law enforcement can bring to bear – deterrence.

The American Bar Association describes the rule of law as a foundational principle for the U.S. justice system: “No one is above the law, everyone is treated equally under the law, everyone is held accountable to the same laws, there are clear and fair processes for enforcing laws, there is an independent judiciary, and human rights are guaranteed for all.”

A gray-haired man in a blue suit and white shirt, talking while gesturing. — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has said he intends to pardon the Army veteran who was recently convicted of killing a Black Lives Matter protester.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Diminishing deterrence

In a recent CNN town hall, former President Donald Trump said that if reelected, he is interested in pardoning the recently convicted leadership of the Proud Boys and others who took part in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

This is not the first time that Trump has suggested he is considering such an offer. When he was president, he did pardon anti-government extremists.

The pardon power is not limited to a sitting president, however; state governors can issue pardons for state crimes. And some have expressed similar interest in pardoning those convicted of politically motivated criminal acts in recent years.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has said he intends to pardon the Army veteran who was recently convicted of killing a Black Lives Matter protester and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

In August 2021, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson pardoned the couple convicted of gun charges associated with brandishing firearms at protesters during the racial justice marches over the summer of 2020.

Together, these public statements about, and the use of, pardons for politically motivated crime undercut the ability of law enforcement and the intelligence community to deter domestic political extremism.

At its simplest, deterrence means that when people consider whether to do something wrong or illegal, they think about the consequences that they, and others, face or have faced.

When punishment is certain, closer in time to the criminal behavior and proportionally severe, people will be less likely to commit crimes. Research in criminology has shown that of these three aspects, increasing the certainty of punishment can lower the incidence of crime. This is important, because when a pardon is offered, the certainty of punishment is dramatically diminished – lowering the potential deterrent.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson pardoned this couple, convicted of gun charges associated with brandishing firearms at protesters during the racial justice marches over the summer of 2020.

Criminal sanctuary

Since Jan. 6, 2021, over 1,000 of the people who participated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol have been criminally charged.

Of these, more than 500 have pleaded guilty, and the Department of Justice has secured convictions in all but one trial.

In other circumstances, the legal consequences could be expected to deter others from political violence in the U.S. However, when politicians signal that those responsible for or guilty of violence aligned with their interests could be shielded from punishment – as shown by the use of pardons – punishment seems less likely. This message of criminal sanctuary – relief from punishment – is what former President Trump, Gov. Abbott and Gov. Parson are communicating.

Recent research draws a direct connection between criminal sanctuary and political violence. “When people perceive that they will be provided sanctuary for their criminal actions … this too leads to crime,” write scholars Laura Dugan and Daren Fisher.

In my research, I look at how these signals of criminal sanctuary by politicians and elected officials are interpreted and acted upon by far-right online communities in the United States.

In a series of recent studies, my co-authors and I looked at what members of far-right online communities talked about and how it changed from before the November 2020 U.S. presidential election through the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Over the three-month period, when compared with mainstream online communities, far-right communities, most of them accepting of political violence, shifted their focus from discussions of disinformation around the election to specifically advocating for anti-government violence and civil war.

We looked at how far-right online communities responded when then-President Trump called on his supporters in a tweet to come to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, saying it “will be wild!” These users listened to the then president and responded with a sentiment of self-righteousness and a greater focus on the idea that they were acting as soldiers on behalf of Trump.

Consequently, members of those online communities played an important role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

In fact, the bipartisan House committee investigating the attack highlighted former President Trump’s “will be wild” tweet as a call to action for his supporters and a signal that their actions on his behalf wouldn’t result in legal consequences.

Despite the “tough on crime” stances taken by many conservative politicians, the use of pardons to offer criminal sanctuary likely undermines the rule of law and increases the risks of political violence.

Michael H. Becker, Doctoral Student, Department of Justice, Law, and Criminology, American University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, even though deterrence is probably not the best reason to lock them up, I do believe that we need to do so. And I’m glad to see someone making a case for it.

The Furies and I will be back.

Everyday Erinyes #375

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 4:30 pm Politics

Jun 182023

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Deforestation. You’ve all heard of it. We all know it contributes to climate change. But I’ll bet you didn’t know wha else it contributes to – and that is “spillover.”

Spillover is what it is called when a virus or other disease agent leaps from an animal to a human being. Spillover is what caused the Ebola outbreak (and in that case, the outbreak can be linked directly to deforestation.) Spillover is what brought is CoViD-19, and all its variants. And the next spillover may be only one forest clearing away.

Pro Publica, which has the story inas much detail as a non-medical-professional can be expected to grasp, is a Creative COmmons site. Following certain guidelines and attributions (such as include all links but no pictures), it’s perfectly kegal for me to quote a full article from them here. But this is not just one article – it is a three-part series – and any one of the three is too much reading dfoe a Sinday afternoon, and especially on a holiday weekend. So, instead, I am going to share links to all three, in order, with at least one startling quote from each. I am not trying to scare anyone just to be scaring you, no am I trying to make a simple political point – it’s way too complex for that. But some of this information should scare anyone. That’s just how it is.
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Part One of the series is “On the Edge.” It details sequences of events in Guinea – specifically in Meliandou, Guinea – where the Ebola outbreak started.

By 2013, a village had bloomed where trees once stood — 31 homes, surrounded by a ring of forest and footpaths that led to pockets residents had cleared to plant rice. Their children played in a hollowed-out tree that was home to a large colony of bats.

Nobody knows exactly how it happened, but a virus that once lived inside a bat found its way into the cells of a toddler named Emile Ouamouno. It was Ebola, which invades on multiple fronts — the immune system, the liver, the lining of vessels that keep blood from leaking into the body. Emile ran a high fever and passed stool blackened with blood as his body tried to defend against the attack. A few days later, Emile was dead.

On average, only half of those infected by Ebola survive; the rest die of medical shock and organ failure. The virus took Emile’s 4-year-old sister and their mother, who perished after delivering a stillborn child. Emile’s grandmother, feverish and vomiting, clung to the back of a motorbike taxi as it hurtled out of the forest toward a hospital in the nearest city, Guéckédou, a market hub drawing traders from neighboring countries. She died as the virus began its spread.

On average, only half of those infected by Ebola survive; the rest die of medical shock and organ failure. The virus took Emile’s 4-year-old sister and their mother, who perished after delivering a stillborn child. Emile’s grandmother, feverish and vomiting, clung to the back of a motorbike taxi as it hurtled out of the forest toward a hospital in the nearest city, Guéckédou, a market hub drawing traders from neighboring countries. She died as the virus began its spread.

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But looking back, researchers now see that dangerous conditions were brewing before the virus leaped from animals to humans in Meliandou, an event scientists call spillover.

The way the villagers cut down trees, in patches that look like Swiss cheese from above, created edges of disturbed forest where humans and infected animals could collide. Rats and bats, with their histories of seeding plagues, are the species most likely to adapt to deforestation. And researchers have found that some bats stressed out by habitat loss later shed more virus.

Researchers considered more than 100 variables that could contribute to an Ebola outbreak and found that the ones that began in Meliandou and six other locations in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo were best explained by forest loss in the two years leading up to the first cases.

It is now clear these landscapes were tinderboxes for the spillover of a deadly virus.

Part Two of the series is “Seeding Hope.” It deals with events and lessons learned in Madagascar, one of many areas in the world which have rainforest problems – because they are disappearing.

The following year, representatives from each of those villages gathered in a soccer field to watch as their chiefs pressed inky thumbs onto paper, signing an agreement that affirmed their communities would stop encroaching on the forest. In return, Health In Harmony began providing affordable health care through mobile clinics and teaching residents how to grow more food and support themselves without cutting down more trees.

Founded in 2006 to save rainforests and combat climate change, Health In Harmony may have stumbled upon a way to help prevent the next pandemic.

Researchers have shown that deforestation can drive outbreaks by bringing people closer to wildlife, which can shed dangerous viruses. Scientists found these dynamics can explain several recent outbreaks of Ebola, including the largest one nearly a decade ago in Guinea, which scientists believe started after a toddler played in a tree that was home to a large colony of bats. The child may have touched something contaminated with saliva or waste from an infected bat, then put his hands in his mouth, inadvertently giving the virus a foothold.

The moment in which a virus jumps from an animal to a human is called spillover. Though we now know more than we ever have about why, where and how these events happen, global health authorities have failed to make preventing them a priority. Instead, they’ve focused resources on fighting outbreaks once they begin.

Many see stopping deforestation as an intractable problem that would eat up the scarce money set aside to combat pandemics. Experts convened at the request of the World Health Organization last year argued that the “almost endless list of interventions and safeguards” needed to stop spillover was like trying to “boil the ocean.”

But this Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit, with an annual budget of just $5.3 million for programs in three countries, is demonstrating how working creatively across health, agriculture and the environment may be the key to prevention.

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In 2019, Health In Harmony launched its program in Madagascar. An island nation off the southeast coast of mainland Africa, Madagascar is a biodiversity hot spot with hundreds of mammals and birds that can be found only there. Researchers say the extensive range of unique animals makes it a more likely place for a novel virus to emerge. Madagascar fruit bats, which roost in the Manombo reserve, can carry coronaviruses, filoviruses (the family of viruses that includes Ebola) and henipaviruses (the family that includes the brain-inflaming Nipah and Hendra viruses). Rats and fleas in parts of the country carry the bubonic plague….

“I have learned that the forest, humans and animals are interdependent,” Jocelyn said, “and if the forest is sick, then the animals will be sick, and animals will surely impact humans’ health too.”

Part Three of the series is “The Scientist and the Bats.” Set in Gympie, Australia, it examines the work of Peggy Eby – the latest in a line of research scientists stretching back centuries who have continued their work despite being denied serious consideration (and serious funding.)

Dressed head-to-toe in protective gear, Peggy Eby crawled on her hands and knees under a fig tree, searching for bat droppings and fruit with telltale fang marks.

Another horse in Australia had died from the dreaded Hendra virus that winter in 2011. For years, the brain-inflaming infectious disease had bedeviled the country, leaping from bats to horses and sometimes from horses to humans. Hendra was as fatal as it was mysterious, striking in a seemingly random fashion. Experts fear that if the virus mutates, it could jump from person to person and wreak havoc.

So while government veterinarians screened other horses, Eby, a wildlife ecologist with a Ph.D., got to work, grubbing around the scene like a detective. Nobody knew flying foxes, the bats that spread Hendra, better. For nearly a quarter century, she’d studied the furry, fox-faced mammals with wingspans up to 3 feet. Eby deduced that the horse paddock wasn’t where the bats had transmitted Hendra. But the horse’s owners had picked mandarin oranges off the trees across the street. The peels ended up in the compost bin, where their horse liked to rummage. “Bingo,” Eby thought. Flying foxes liked mandarins. The bats’ saliva must have contaminated the peels, turning them into a deadly snack.

Eby, however, longed to unlock a bigger mystery: Could she, with the help of fellow scientists, predict when the conditions were prime for Hendra to spill over from bats, before it took any more lives? What if they could warn the public to be on guard — maybe even prevent the virus from making the leap? It would be painstaking work, but it wasn’t a pipe dream; Eby was already spotting patterns as she crawled around infection sites.

But when she pitched her research to a government funder the following year, she got a flat no. She proposed starting small, gathering basic data on flying foxes that could be used to figure out when and why they spread the virus. Her work, she was told, wasn’t considered a “sufficiently important contribution.”

******

In a world still scarred by the COVID-19 pandemic, Eby’s dogged success exposes a global scientific blind spot. It’s not that trendy science involving the latest AI wonders isn’t worthy of research dollars. It’s that it should not be funded at the expense of the sort of long-term, shoe-leather work that allowed Eby and her colleagues to solve the mystery of a deadly contagion, Vora and other public health experts say. “All of these actions are important if we want to save as many lives as possible from infectious diseases,” Vora added.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I don’t like stories that make me think, “Oh, God, here we go again,” or “Oh, God, I’m glad I’m old.” But of course those are the stories that the world most needs to hear – and also to act on. People have been saying for hundreds of years that “An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure” (Benjamin Franklin first used it in writing in 11735, but it can’t have been new, and the concept goes back at least to Aesop), but we still don’t seem to get it.

The Furies and I will be back.

Everyday Erinyes #374

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 3:12 pm Politics

Jun 112023

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Heaven knows what is happening with Donald Trump** these days is truly unprecedented in the history of the U.S., and maybe in any country’s history. There are plenty of nations which have been betrayed and/or abused by their leaders; some have faced accountbility, others not so much. Donald can be happy (if he even knows how to be happy) that he is not Charles I of England, nor Louis XVI of France, nor Nicholas II of Russia. But one thing there is a precedent for is running for President against a former colleague (I put it that was because this story includes a matchup between a former President against the prsimptive nominee his former VP rather than the other way around.)
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Mike Pence is jockeying against Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination – joining the ranks of just one vice president who, in 1800, also ran against a former boss

Former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence appear together in November 2020.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Shannon Bow O’Brien, The University of Texas at Austin

Former Vice President Mike Pence filed paperwork to declare his candidacy for president on June 5, 2023 – placing him in unusual ranks.

While 18 of the 49 former vice presidents have gone on to run for president, it’s rare for vice presidents to run against their former bosses. Six of these former vice presidents, including President Joe Biden, were ultimately elected president.

Pence, alongside other candidates, officially announced his bid on June 7.

Pence and former President Donald Trump have had a complicated relationship. Pence’s devout conservative evangelical Christianity was a crucial ingredient in helping carry Trump to victory in 2016.

But Trump blames Pence for the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots and has said he is angry with him for certifying the 2020 election results. Pence remained trapped at the Capitol during the attack, which Trump did nothing to try to end.

There are only a few other times in American history that are vaguely similar to the unfolding battle over who will become the Republican presidential nominee. Both were extraordinarily bitter, and centuries later, their strife still makes historians and experts on the presidency – including myself – raise eyebrows.

A man with white hair looks to his side at a man with an open mouth and light white hair who is speaking. — Mike Pence, left, is the second vice president to run against his former boss for election.
Win McNamee/Getty Images

Name-calling in 1800

There is one other time in history when a vice president ran against the president he served with in office.

In the election of 1800, Vice President Thomas Jefferson challenged incumbent President John Adams. Adams had won the presidency in 1796, and Jefferson was runner-up, making him vice president. Until 1804, the person who came in first in a presidential election became commander in chief, while the person who brought in the second-most votes became vice president.

Jefferson, though, wanted the top job.

And so when Adams ran for reelection, Jefferson ran against him in one of the most notorious races in American history.

Jefferson’s allies called Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

An Adams ally with the pseudonym of Burleigh, meanwhile, offered an omen if Jefferson won the presidency: “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced, the air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood, and the nation black with crimes,” Burleigh wrote.

The two used proxies to level vicious personal attacks against one another in the press. But neither one gained the advantage. The election ended in an Electoral College tie. This set up what is sometimes known as the Revolution of 1800 – the very first time one group in political power peacefully ceded that power to another group, based on the results of an election.

Jefferson emerged victorious from the election.

A black and white photo shows a large room filled with people, in a stadium like setting. — A view of the Republican National Convention in June 1912, when William Howard Taft was nominated to serve on the ticket.
PhotoQuest/Getty Images

‘Dumber than a guinea pig’ in 1912

But there is another point in history that is similar to the Trump vs. Pence race that is about to get underway.

Vice President Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency after the death of President William McKinley in 1901. Roosevelt was reelected in 1904 and decided to leave office in 1909, rather than seek another term.

Roosevelt endorsed William Howard Taft, his secretary of war, for president. And Taft won the race easily.

But Roosevelt grew unhappy with the Taft administration, as he felt it was not upholding his beliefs that the president should do what is necessary for the good of the country, as long as it is not explicitly forbidden by law.

In one instance, the Taft administration filed a lawsuit against U.S. Steel Corporation for violating antitrust laws that prevent unlawful mergers or other business practices.

Roosevelt went into a fury. Other factors were at play, but he had personally approved the steel company’s trust and viewed Taft’s actions as a personal attack against himself and his administration’s legacy.

Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican nomination and ran against him in 1912. The former president dusted off his bully pulpit and used his rhetorical knives to their maximum advantage against Taft.

In the spring of 1912, Roosevelt referred to Taft as a “fathead,” “puzzlewit” and “dumber than a guinea pig.”

Taft then used the term puzzlewit in a humorous, self-deprecating way to draw attention to what he felt were failures of Roosevelt. This included Roosevelt’s opposition to treaties with Great Britain and France.

Taft also said in a 1912 campaign speech in Ohio that, “I hold that the man is a demagogue and a flatterer who comes out and tells the people that they know it all. I hate a flatterer. I like a man to tell the truth straight out, and I hate to see a man try to honeyfuggle the people by telling them something he doesn’t believe.”

The 1912 Chicago Republican Convention, where the two faced off, was one of the most raucous in history. Taft and Roosevelt supporters even got into into fistfights.

The Republican Party leadership ultimately backed Taft. And Roosevelt, in dramatic fashion, removed his supporters from the convention after a speech, in which he declared, “… we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!”

Then, Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party and split Republicans, paving the way for Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s presidential win.

No other time exactly like it

Pence’s decision to run against Trump has no direct equivalent in American history.

This election cycle will break new ground and help establish future expected norms – in part because Trump is the only candidate to have run while facing a criminal indictment and multiple other ongoing investigations of potential criminal activity.

However, if the past is a prologue, the Republican primary season will likely have more in common with the Roosevelt and Taft match-up than others, at least in terms of direct insults and attacks upon leadership style – things Trump is known for doing.

Shannon Bow O’Brien, Associate Professor of Instruction, The University of Texas at Austin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, We can all be grateful the winner-President-second-place-VP system did not last, and the Adams/Jefferson Presidency must have been a big reason why it didn’t. It would have been a lot like having Trump as President and Hillary as VP. Adams was not evil, but he was about as opposite Jefferson in his politics as two people can be (and to top it off, Jefferson had a crush on Abigail.)

I realize this is not exactly the hottest news today, and what is hot is the full indictment, which Jack Smith has suggested that literally everyone should read. It’s a speaking indictment, so it could be a lot harder to get through, and it is at the bottom of the page at this link.

The Furies and I will be back.

Everyday Erinyes #373

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 5:36 pm Politics

Jun 042023

Artificial intelligence has been around for a long time. One can argue that mechanizing arithmeical calculation is itself a form of AI, and, if so, that takes it back to Babbage in the early 1800s. Or you can go back millennia and reference the abacus. “Teaching” machines words and concepts has been longer in arriving, but that still goes back more than fifty years. Terry Winograd published the program SHRDLU in 1972, and I doubt whether he was the first. But SHRDLU was essentially designed to open up possibilities. It was far from Watson (which defeated Jeopardy champtions) and even farther from ChatGPT, which has been said to have a tendency to make up the references which it cites and the facts cited. We already have more than enough live Republicans doing that. We don’t need machines for it.
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How can Congress regulate AI? Erect guardrails, ensure accountability and address monopolistic power

IBM executive Christina Montgomery, cognitive scientist Gary Marcus and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman prepared to testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee.
AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

Anjana Susarla, Michigan State University

Takeaways:

A new federal agency to regulate AI sounds helpful but could become unduly influenced by the tech industry. Instead, Congress can legislate accountability.
Instead of licensing companies to release advanced AI technologies, the government could license auditors and push for companies to set up institutional review boards.
The government hasn’t had great success in curbing technology monopolies, but disclosure requirements and data privacy laws could help check corporate power.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman urged lawmakers to consider regulating AI during his Senate testimony on May 16, 2023. That recommendation raises the question of what comes next for Congress. The solutions Altman proposed – creating an AI regulatory agency and requiring licensing for companies – are interesting. But what the other experts on the same panel suggested is at least as important: requiring transparency on training data and establishing clear frameworks for AI-related risks.

Another point left unsaid was that, given the economics of building large-scale AI models, the industry may be witnessing the emergence of a new type of tech monopoly.

As a researcher who studies social media and artificial intelligence, I believe that Altman’s suggestions have highlighted important issues but don’t provide answers in and of themselves. Regulation would be helpful, but in what form? Licensing also makes sense, but for whom? And any effort to regulate the AI industry will need to account for the companies’ economic power and political sway.

An agency to regulate AI?

Lawmakers and policymakers across the world have already begun to address some of the issues raised in Altman’s testimony. The European Union’s AI Act is based on a risk model that assigns AI applications to three categories of risk: unacceptable, high risk, and low or minimal risk. This categorization recognizes that tools for social scoring by governments and automated tools for hiring pose different risks than those from the use of AI in spam filters, for example.

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology likewise has an AI risk management framework that was created with extensive input from multiple stakeholders, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Federation of American Scientists, as well as other business and professional associations, technology companies and think tanks.

Federal agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Federal Trade Commission have already issued guidelines on some of the risks inherent in AI. The Consumer Product Safety Commission and other agencies have a role to play as well.

Rather than create a new agency that runs the risk of becoming compromised by the technology industry it’s meant to regulate, Congress can support private and public adoption of the NIST risk management framework and pass bills such as the Algorithmic Accountability Act. That would have the effect of imposing accountability, much as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other regulations transformed reporting requirements for companies. Congress can also adopt comprehensive laws around data privacy.

Regulating AI should involve collaboration among academia, industry, policy experts and international agencies. Experts have likened this approach to international organizations such as the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The internet has been managed by nongovernmental bodies involving nonprofits, civil society, industry and policymakers, such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly. Those examples provide models for industry and policymakers today.

Cognitive scientist and AI developer Gary Marcus explains the need to regulate AI.

Licensing auditors, not companies

Though OpenAI’s Altman suggested that companies could be licensed to release artificial intelligence technologies to the public, he clarified that he was referring to artificial general intelligence, meaning potential future AI systems with humanlike intelligence that could pose a threat to humanity. That would be akin to companies being licensed to handle other potentially dangerous technologies, like nuclear power. But licensing could have a role to play well before such a futuristic scenario comes to pass.

Algorithmic auditing would require credentialing, standards of practice and extensive training. Requiring accountability is not just a matter of licensing individuals but also requires companywide standards and practices.

Experts on AI fairness contend that issues of bias and fairness in AI cannot be addressed by technical methods alone but require more comprehensive risk mitigation practices such as adopting institutional review boards for AI. Institutional review boards in the medical field help uphold individual rights, for example.

Academic bodies and professional societies have likewise adopted standards for responsible use of AI, whether it is authorship standards for AI-generated text or standards for patient-mediated data sharing in medicine.

Strengthening existing statutes on consumer safety, privacy and protection while introducing norms of algorithmic accountability would help demystify complex AI systems. It’s also important to recognize that greater data accountability and transparency may impose new restrictions on organizations.

Scholars of data privacy and AI ethics have called for “technological due process” and frameworks to recognize harms of predictive processes. The widespread use of AI-enabled decision-making in such fields as employment, insurance and health care calls for licensing and audit requirements to ensure procedural fairness and privacy safeguards.

Requiring such accountability provisions, though, demands a robust debate among AI developers, policymakers and those who are affected by broad deployment of AI. In the absence of strong algorithmic accountability practices, the danger is narrow audits that promote the appearance of compliance.

AI monopolies?

What was also missing in Altman’s testimony is the extent of investment required to train large-scale AI models, whether it is GPT-4, which is one of the foundations of ChatGPT, or text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion. Only a handful of companies, such as Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, are responsible for developing the world’s largest language models.

Given the lack of transparency in the training data used by these companies, AI ethics experts Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender and others have warned that large-scale adoption of such technologies without corresponding oversight risks amplifying machine bias at a societal scale.

It is also important to acknowledge that the training data for tools such as ChatGPT includes the intellectual labor of a host of people such as Wikipedia contributors, bloggers and authors of digitized books. The economic benefits from these tools, however, accrue only to the technology corporations.

Proving technology firms’ monopoly power can be difficult, as the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Microsoft demonstrated. I believe that the most feasible regulatory options for Congress to address potential algorithmic harms from AI may be to strengthen disclosure requirements for AI firms and users of AI alike, to urge comprehensive adoption of AI risk assessment frameworks, and to require processes that safeguard individual data rights and privacy.

Learn what you need to know about artificial intelligence by signing up for our newsletter series of four emails delivered over the course of a week. You can read all our stories on generative AI at TheConversation.com.

Anjana Susarla, Professor of Information Systems, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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AMT, at a time and in a nation where YouTube has decided to allow videos from election deniers (including election-denying videos), AI presents another clear and present danger. We may not have more than one chnce to get it right – and even if we do get a second chance, there will likely have been damage done. There are people in Congrss, both houses, whom I would trust to make informed decisions on this. There are just not enough of them. And maybe that’s the point.

The Furies and I will be back.

Everyday Erinyes #372

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 4:39 pm Politics

May 282023

We all need to eat – and unless you grow everything you eat (which I certainly don’t – I haven’t even been able, over the longhaul, to grow all my own chives) you depend on farmers (using the term to include ranchers.) In addition to eating, I also have food allergies, including to the two top cash crops we grow here – corn and soy – so I have a more than passing interest n the farm bill – at least in theory. But since we started in the 1930’s passing multi-year farm bills, those bills have become so unwieldy that I strongly suspect that no one actually kows what is in them – not down to the last detail. But Director Merrigan, who wrote this article does know more than most people – including a good chunk of Congress.
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These four challenges will shape the next farm bill – and how the US eats

Small-scale farmers, organic producers and local markets receive a tiny fraction of farm bill funding.
Edwin Remsberg/VWPics/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Kathleen Merrigan, Arizona State University

For the 20th time since 1933, Congress is writing a multiyear farm bill that will shape what kind of food U.S. farmers grow, how they raise it and how it gets to consumers. These measures are large, complex and expensive: The next farm bill is projected to cost taxpayers US$1.5 trillion over 10 years.

Modern farm bills address many things besides food, from rural broadband access to biofuels and even help for small towns to buy police cars. These measures bring out a dizzying range of interest groups with diverse agendas.

Umbrella organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Farmers Union typically focus on farm subsidies and crop insurance. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition advocates for small farmers and ranchers. Industry-specific groups, such as cattlemen, fruit and vegetable growers and organic producers, all have their own interests.

Environmental and conservation groups seek to influence policies that affect land use and sustainable farming practices. Hunger and nutrition groups target the bill’s sections on food aid. Rural counties, hunters and anglers, bankers and dozens of other organizations have their own wish lists.

As a former Senate aide and senior official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, I’ve seen this intricate process from all sides. In my view, with the challenges in this round so complex and with critical 2024 elections looming, it could take Congress until 2025 to craft and enact a bill. Here are four key issues shaping the next farm bill, and through it, the future of the U.S. food system.

The price tag

Farm bills always are controversial because of their high cost, but this year the timing is especially tricky. In the past two years, Congress has enacted major bills to provide economic relief from the COVID-19 pandemic, counter inflation, invest in infrastructure and boost domestic manufacturing.

These measures follow unprecedented spending for farm support during the Trump administration. Now legislators are jockeying over raising the debt ceiling, which limits how much the federal government can borrow to pay its bills.

Agriculture Committee leaders and farm groups argue that more money is necessary to strengthen the food and farm sector. If they have their way, the price tag for the next farm bill would increase significantly from current projections.

On the other side, reformers argue for capping payments to farmers, which The Washington Post recently described as an “expensive agricultural safety net,” and restricting payment eligibility. In their view, too much money goes to very large farms that produce commodity crops like wheat, corn, soybeans and rice, while small and medium-size producers receive far less support.

Food aid is the key fight

Many people are surprised to learn that nutrition assistance – mainly through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps – is where most farm bill money is spent. Back in the 1970s, Congress began including nutrition assistance in the farm bill to secure votes from an increasingly urban nation.

Today, over 42 million Americans depend on SNAP, including nearly 1 in every 4 children. Along with a few smaller programs, SNAP will likely consume 80% of the money in the new farm bill, up from 76% in 2018.

Why have SNAP costs grown? During the pandemic, SNAP benefits were increased on an emergency basis, but that temporary arrangement expired in March 2023. Also, in response to a directive included in the 2018 farm bill, the Department of Agriculture recalculated what it takes to afford a healthy diet, known as the Thrifty Food Plan, and determined that it required an additional $12-$16 per month per recipient, or 40 cents per meal.

Because it’s such a large target, SNAP is where much of the budget battle will play out. Most Republicans typically seek to rein in SNAP; most Democrats usually support expanding it.

Anti-hunger advocates are lobbying to make the increased pandemic benefits permanent and defend the revised Thrifty Food Plan. In contrast, Republicans are calling for SNAP reductions, and are particularly focused on expanding work requirements for recipients.

Groceries on a kitchen counter. — Jaqueline Benitez puts away groceries at her home in Bellflower, Calif., Feb. 13, 2023. Benitez, 21, works as a preschool teacher and depends on SNAP benefits to help pay for food.
AP Photo/Allison Dinner

Debating climate solutions

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act provided $19.5 billion to the Department of Agriculture for programs that address climate change. Environmentalists and farmers alike applauded this investment, which is intended to help the agriculture sector embrace climate-smart farming practices and move toward markets that reward carbon sequestration and other ecosystem services.

This big pot of money has become a prime target for members of Congress who are looking for more farm bill funding. On the other side, conservation advocates, sustainable farmers and progressive businesses oppose diverting climate funds for other purposes.

There also is growing demand for Congress to require USDA to develop better standards for measuring, reporting and verifying actions designed to protect or increase soil carbon. Interest is rising in “carbon farming” – paying farmers for practices such as no-till agriculture and planting cover crops, which some studies indicate can increase carbon storage in soil.

But without more research and standards, observers worry that investments in climate-smart agriculture will support greenwashing – misleading claims about environmental benefits – rather than a fundamentally different system of production. Mixed research results have raised questions as to whether establishing carbon markets based on such practices is premature.

A complex bill and inexperienced legislators

Understanding farm bills requires highly specialized knowledge about issues ranging from crop insurance to nutrition to forestry. Nearly one-third of current members of Congress were first elected after the 2018 farm bill was enacted, so this is their first farm bill cycle.

I expect that, as often occurs in Congress, new members will follow more senior legislators’ cues and go along with traditional decision making. This will make it easier for entrenched interests, like the American Farm Bureau Federation and major commodity groups, to maintain support for Title I programs, which provide revenue support for major commodity crops like corn, wheat and soybeans. These programs are complex, cost billions of dollars and go mainly to large-scale operations.

How the U.S. became a corn superpower.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s current stump speech spotlights the fact that 89% of U.S. farmers failed to make a livable profit in 2022, even though total farm income set a record at $162 billion. Vilsack asserts that less-profitable operations should be the focus of this farm bill – but when pressed, he appears unwilling to concede that support for large-scale operations should be changed in any way.

When I served as deputy secretary of agriculture from 2009 to 2011, I oversaw the department’s budget process and learned that investing in one thing often requires defunding another. My dream farm bill would invest in three priorities: organic agriculture as a climate solution; infrastructure to support vibrant local and regional markets and shift away from an agricultural economy dependent on exporting low-value crops; and agricultural science and technology research aimed at reducing labor and chemical inputs and providing new solutions for sustainable livestock production.

In my view, it is time for tough policy choices, and it won’t be possible to fund everything. Congress’ response will show whether it supports business as usual in agriculture, or a more diverse and sustainable U.S. farm system.

Kathleen Merrigan, Executive Director, Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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AMT, if Merrigan is correct and we are not able to pass a farm bill before 2025 (and she makes a solid case), and if we do not gain the House, increase our lead in the Senate, and hold the White House, that bill is likely to be a disaster. And, in one way or another, every American will be affected. And I don’t have any answers. My best suggestion is for you to help us get people elected to Congress who are both caring and intelligent. And help get them elected in sufficient quantity that the anarchist Republicans (I use the term loosely – I know it does have a meaning that doesn’t fit them) will not be able to ruin it. A daunting task indeed.

The Furies and I will be back.

Everyday Erinyes #371

Posted by Joanne Dixon at 4:21 pm Politics

May 212023

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Back in the day, when i was doing shift work, I cconsidered it a matter of principle to volunteer to work holiday shifts so the at least one person with children would not have to. I would have been very unhappy, to put it mildly, if an employer had wanted to impose that on me. But a case currently in oral arguments a SCOTUS is apparently considering permiting exactly that.
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Co-workers could bear costs of accommodating religious employees in the workplace if Supreme Court tosses out 46-year-old precedent

The Supreme Court may require employers to be more accommodating to religious requests in the workplace.
Victor Plop/500px via Getty Images

Debbie Kaminer, Baruch College, CUNY

The Supreme Court may soon transform the role of faith in the workplace, which could have the effect of elevating the rights of religious workers at the expense of co-workers.

On April 18, 2023, the court heard oral arguments in Groff v. DeJoy, a case addressing an employer’s obligation to accommodate religious employees’ requests under federal law. The dispute involves a Christian postal worker who quit his job and sued the U.S. Postal Service after he was unable to find coverage for his Sunday shifts. Current law requires employers to make accommodations for workers’ religious requests only if doing so doesn’t impose more than a minimal cost on their business, known as the “de minimis” standard.

After listening to the oral arguments in the case, I believe it’s very likely the court will overturn the de minimis standard and require employers to accommodate more religious requests. As Justice Gorsuch stated, “I think there’s common ground that de minimis can’t be the test, in isolation at least, because Congress doesn’t pass civil rights legislation to have de minimis effect, right?”

In my view, as a scholar of employment discrimination, the only questions are how far the justices will go – and who will ultimately pay the price.

Religious rights in the workplace

Employers are required to accommodate the religious needs of employees under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so long as they can do so without imposing an “undue hardship.”

Congress didn’t define what that term meant, and it took another dozen years for the U.S. Supreme Court to do so in Trans World Airlines v. Haridson. The court determined that Title VII does not require employers to bear more than a “de minimis” or minimal cost in accommodating religious employees.

Relying on this narrow decision, employees requesting religious accommodation in the workplace have generally fared poorly in the courts. Supporters of more religious accommodation in the workplace have tried many times to amend Title VII to redefine undue hardship as a “significant difficulty or expense.”

From 1994 to 2013, over a dozen bills attempting to codify this definition were introduced in Congress, with none coming close to passage. After failing to persuade Congress to amend Title VII, religious advocates turned to the Supreme Court. However, the court’s decision to hear this case is highly unusual, since it suggests it is considering overturning its own long-standing precedent.

The other key issue in the case is whether or not a religious accommodation that imposes on co-workers can count as an undue hardship on the employer.

Since Trans World Airlines v. Haridson, most federal appellate courts have determined that accommodations affecting religious employees’ co-workers – such as those requiring them to take over undesirable weekend shifts – can be an undue hardship, even if the business is not directly harmed. In practice, that has made it easier for an employer to avoid accommodating a religious request.

Business interests vs. religious rights

Ultimately, the Groff case pits business interests against religious rights. That presents a unique dilemma for the current court led by Chief Justice John Roberts, which is both the most pro-business and the most pro-religion court in recent memory.

One way to resolve these two apparently competing interests would be to overturn the de minimis standard and require employers to provide greater accommodation to religious employees while allowing employers to sometimes shift this cost to co-workers.

Based on what the justices said at the hearing and their discussion about accommodations that affect worker morale, I believe it’s likely that that’s exactly what the Supreme Court is going to do. That would have the effect of dramatically limiting employee rights.

Take, for example, one common type of accommodation request, which is time off from work for religious observance.

In those cases, either co-workers can bear the cost of accommodation, by covering for the religious employee without necessarily earning more income, or the employer can bear the cost of accommodation, by hiring additional workers, paying premium wages or suffering a loss of productivity. If the Supreme Court determines that a cost to co-workers alone can never be an undue hardship under Title VII, employers would likely shift the cost of accommodation onto co-workers – for example, requiring them to work an undesirable weekend shift.

Unless an accommodation also leads to a significant difficulty or expense on the business itself – such as through a loss of productivity or efficiency – harm to co-workers would never be a justification for denying an accommodation, as it has been in most federal appellate courts.

rainbow flag is seen with the supreme court's columned building in background — The court could promote employees’ religious rights at the expense of their LGBTQ colleagues.
AP Photo/Susan Walsh

Co-workers bearing the brunt

Co-workers could also be harmed in cases involving accommodation of religious expression. This is of particular concern in cases in which religious expression demeans LGBTQ+ people.

In 2004, the 9th Circuit determined that it would pose an undue hardship and be demeaning to co-workers for a religious employee to post in his cubicle the Bible verse “If a man also lie with mankind … both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death.”

Yet if the Supreme Court broadens the definition of undue hardship and determines costs to co-workers alone never create an undue hardship, employers might be required – by a civil rights law originally aimed at prohibiting employment discrimination – to accommodate religious expression that demeans LGBTQ+ employees.

Assuming the Supreme Court decides this case as expected, the losers would be co-workers who will bear the brunt of the increased religious accommodation requirement. And the Roberts court would maintain its status as one of the most pro-business and pro-religion courts in modern times.

Debbie Kaminer, Professor of Law, Baruch College, CUNY

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, at this point, it is quite premature to try to predict what the court eill do. But the author of this article was concerned enough to write it as a caution, and it would not hurt to consider thr possibilities.

The Furies and I will be back.

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