Posted on | March 19, 2024 | Comments Off on The Long Tail of Liability For MAGA Republicans
Mike Magee
If legal scholars are right that “forseeability” and “special relationships” are the toxic mix most common in “long liability tails”, then MAGA Republicans should expect a rocky decade ahead. Trump acolytes in federal and state executive, legislative and judicial branches are massively exposed on at least two fronts.
Led by Christian White Nationalists who succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade via the Dobbs decision, party elites already know they face trouble at the ballot box. But that’s the least of it.
As former Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer recently wrote in his new book, Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism, the Dobbs decision was “stunningly naïve in saying it was returning the question of abortion to the political process…The Dobbs majority’s hope, that legislatures and not courts will decide the abortion question, will not be realized…There are too many questions…Are they really going to allow women to die on the table because they won’t allow an abortion which would save her life? I mean, really, no one would do that. And they wouldn’t do that. And there’ll be dozens of questions like that.”
Allowing ultra-conservative state legislators to play doctor with women’s lives in the balance not only endangers them, but also captures compliant hospitals and doctors in spiraling decades long liability as women predictably suffer and die needlessly. As the initial flurry over IVF and Alabama’s “extra-uterine children” embryos clearly illustrates, “God’s will” is unlikely to hold sway in court once the Puritan fever breaks. And until enough Red state ballot initiatives neuter Dobbs, hospital CEO’s and medical staff will find being continuously subpoenaed to be emotionally, physically and financially demanding.
And that’s not all. If “foreseeability” and “special relationship” are the two linchpins here, one could easily argue that characters like Bill Barr, Mike Esper, John Bolton and others in Trump’s inner circle [let alone Jan.6 co-conspirators like Congressmen Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Scott Perry (R-PA)] could easily fall within the orbit of “The Tarasoff Rule” for failing to protect us as citizens and our democracy from the criminal behavior of Donald Trump.
“The Tarasoff Rule” is named for Tatiana Tarasoff, a student at University of California who was murdered by a graduate student in 1969. The details of the case are quite simple. On June 5, 1969, University of California at Berkeley graduate student, Prosenjit Poddar, arrived distraught and angry at the office of mental health professional, Dr. Lawrence Moore. Poddar had become infatuated with student Tatiana Tarasoff, and was enraged when she rejected him. Over the next 14 weeks, Poddar was seen seven times by Dr. Moore, and during the final visit on August 20, 1969, confided that he intended to kill Tatiana. He was diagnosed then and there as having a “paranoid schizophrenic reaction,” and police were notified to execute a mandatory psychiatric hospital admission.
Poddar was taken into custody, but soon after released after he promised to avoid further contact with Tatiana. Two months later, on October 27, 1969, he entered her home “while she was alone in her home, shot her with a pellet gun, chased her into the street with a kitchen knife, and stabbed her seventeen times, causing her death.”
Poddar pleaded “guilty by reason of insanity” and was convicted of second-degree murder, which was reduced to manslaughter on appeal. The California Supreme Court concluded even this was too harsh and reversed the conviction. He was freed and he quickly returned to India.
Tatiana’s parents sued, and ultimately the California Court of Appeal reversed itself and found Dr. Moore liable. In making that decision seven years after the crime, on July 1, 1976, the California Supreme Court considered these five factors among others:
- Foreseeability of harm to Plaintiff;
- The degree of certainty that Plaintiff suffered injury;
- The closeness of the connection between Defendent’s conduct and the injury suffered by Plaintiff;
- The moral blame attached to Defendent’s conduct;
- The policy of preventing future harm.
Since 1976, and the California Supreme Court ruling in Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, the “duty to protect” has been added to “the duty to warn” for professionals in support relationships. These are two subtly different sides of the same coin.
“The duty to warn” requires that “the mental health professional…make a good-faith effort to contact the identified target of a client’s serious threats of harm, and/or notify law enforcement.”
“The duty to protect”, while encouraging notifying law enforcement and “warning a potential victim,” also considers positively active patient interventions such as “intensifying outpatient treatment, hospitalization, and modification of medication treatment.”
It can be difficult to impossible to determine the dangerousness of a mental unstable individual with 100% certainty. Mental health professionals, in making their assessments, consider a patient’s appearance and general behavior, speech, mood and affect, thought process and content, sensorium and cognition, perceptions and motor activity, and general judgement.
But MAGA allies from Trump’s Cabinet, Congressional allies, and Trump appointed Justices on state and federal levels will have a difficult time convincing courts over the next decade that they didn’t know what was going on. Trump has a way of broadcasting the evidence against himself, and entangling his loyalist supporters in the process.
As for Trump’s current Republican enablers, a potentially “foreseeable” troubled future is in the process of rising to greet them. Disentangling at this point, from Dobbs or “Trump Legal,” will be complicated and prohibitively expensive. But, best get on with it.
As Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, which extended from 1969 to 1976 so well illustrated, the tail of liability (and ultimately justice), is a long tail indeed.
Posted on | March 14, 2024 | 4 Comments
Note: Randy Souders and Mike Magee served together on the Board of Jean Kennedy Smith’s Kennedy Center Arts and Disability Program,Very Special Arts (VSA) from 2002 to 2007.
Randy Souders,
Guest Editorial
Professional Artist /Arts & Disability Advocate / Quadriplegic (since 1972)
When I was injured at the age of 17 the world was still quite closed for people like me. That was a year before passage of HR 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. As I recall that law was the first to mandate access to public places that received federal funds. A year later Jean Kennedy Smith founded VSA (Very Special Arts) which has provided important arts opportunities to literally millions of people with disabilities around the globe. It was a very different world back then and artistic achievement was an important way people such as myself could prove their worth to a society that still saw little evidence of it.
It’s unbelievable to think there are serious threats to roll back many of those hard won gains in the name of deregulation and profitability. Disability is costly and people with disabilities are still woefully underemployed. So when a billionaire presidential candidate repeatedly mocks people with disabilities, how long till the “useless/ unworthy” excuses rise again? The old term describing a person with a disability as an “invalid” has another meaning. The adjective use is defined as “Not valid; not true, correct, acceptable or appropriate.”
Few today are aware that the first victims of the Holocaust were the mentally, physically and neurologically disabled people. They were systematically murdered by several Nazi programs specifically targeting them. The Nazi regime was aided in their crimes by perverted “medical doctors and other experts” who were often seen wearing white lab coats in order to visually reinforce their propaganda.
Branded as “useless eaters” and existing as “lives not worthy of life,” people with disabilities were declared an unbearable burden both to German society and the state. As Holocaust historians have documented, “From 1939 to 1941 the Nazis carried out a campaign of euthanasia known as the T4 program (an abbreviation of Tiergartenstrasse 4 which itself was a shortened version of Zentral Dienststelle-T4: Central Office T4) the address from which the program was coordinated.”
These most vulnerable of humans were reportedly the first victims of mass extermination by poison gas and cheaper CO2 from automobile exhaust fumes. But first “a panel of medical experts were required to give their approval for the euthanasia/ ‘mercy-killing’ of each person.”
In the end an estimated quarter million people with disabilities were killed in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. This model for killing disabled people was later applied to the industrialized murder within Nazi concentration and death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
Much has been written on this topic but few seem to know the chronology and diabolical history of how these “beneficial cleansings” of undesirables often start. The Nazi’s enlisted medical doctors to provide them with a veneer of moral justification for their atrocities.
Throughout history, authoritarian political despots have also worked diligently to silence dissent and co-opt religion in order to assist in their mutual quests for total control and dominance of others. And theocrats are convinced their particular splinter of a schism is the ultimate authority on earth as well as the entire universe. Stonings, beheadings and the hanging of transgressors and non believers are arbitrarily justified by interpretations of their particular holy book.
There is much to fear when politicians exploit the religious beliefs of medical professionals in order to pass laws denying the rights of others to control their own bodies. This blatant pandering for votes by promising to deliver on religious wedge issues creates a positive feedback loop resulting in politicians being deified by their religious influencers. This is aided by a campaign of rationalization absolving them of their obvious failings. Such a campaign of apologetics by religious leaders is active and widespread in America as I type.
Examples include “God doesn’t call the qualified…He qualifies the called” (Exodus Chapter 4) and “God calls imperfect men to do His perfect will.” Is there even a red line where such “imperfect men” becomes an existential threat? Apparently not. I’m sure most citizens of the Third Reich didn’t think so until everything imploded.
The current Republican candidate for President is on the record as being a believer in the “racehorse theory” – the idea that selective breeding can improve a country’s performance, which American eugenicists and German Nazis used in the last century to buttress their goals of racial purity. On September 18, 2020 he told a mostly white crowd of supporters in Bemidji, Minn. “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it? Don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”
This is one of many such statements he has made regarding genetics that has resulted in his personal superiority and that of his family. The New York Times reports “Mr. Trump was talking publicly about his belief that genetics determined a person’s success in life as early as 1988, when he told Oprah Winfrey that a person had ‘to have the right genes’ in order to achieve great fortune.”
These statements combined with those “about undocumented immigrants poisoning the blood” of America should equate to a 100 alarm fire.
Posted on | March 11, 2024 | 2 Comments
Jimmy Kimmel and Donald Trump don’t get along. A back and forth about the viability of
Trump’s Truth Social site has been the stuff of legends. But Sunday night, the 96th Academy of Awards host might as well have informed his worldwide audience:
“Donald Trump is mentally ill. Say it out loud!”
As the Awards extravaganza was reaching its final “Best Picture” climax, Kimmel reappeared from stage left at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, California, and said he had an extra minute to burn.
As the spotlight shone, Kimmel said , “This show is not about me, and I appreciate you having me. It’s really about you, and Emma, and all these great actors and actresses and filmmakers, but I was told we had like an extra minute, and I’m really proud of something, and I was wondering if I could share it with you. I just got a review.
“Has there ever been a worse host than Jimmy Kimmel at The Oscars. His opening was that of a less than average person trying too hard to be something which he is not, and never can be. Get rid of Kimmel and perhaps replace him with another washed up, but cheap, ABC ‘talent,’ George Slopanopoulos. He would make everybody on stage look bigger, stronger, and more glamorous. Blah. Blah. Blah. Make America Great Again.”
With the structured timing of a comedic pro, Kimmel waited as the laughter began to fade , and then said, “See if you can guess which former president just posted that on Truth Social. Anyone? No? Well thank you President Trump. Thank you for watching. I’m surprised you’re still up. Isn’t it past your jail time?”
A tragic Donald Trump continues to dig himself into a hole that will eventually lead to some personal hell.
I think we are at a point where Trump’s mental illness is undeniable to most. Those who continue to support his candidacy now do so despite the risk to all of us, and for their own personal gain. There remain a few on the religious right who honestly believe that “God put Trump here for a purpose” (to support patriarchy, outlaw abortion, advance Christian nationalism etc.)
This past Friday Trump hosted hard-line Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago. Together they celebrated Christian Nationalism, and found common ground in a reconstruction of 20th century European history where former evil strongmen were somehow divinely converted to victims, swimming upstream against liberal NATO currents.
Academics, Jurists, Priests, and Corporate CEO’s have been careful not to label Trump as mentally ill. But mentally ill he is.
Sadly, his words in 2024 remind of another influential essayist, Kenneth Burke, whose 1939 masterpiece, The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle, is required reading for graduate students from English to Philosophy, and from Political Science to History and Religious Studies. The piece’s main focus involves a critical analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (“my struggle”) which includes this stark warning.
Leaders of the free world need “to discover what kind of ‘medicine’ this medicine-man…concocted, that we may know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America.”
Trump too has written his own fictional story; a despotic force with his own signature “idiolect”.
With the former Republican National Committee under Trump’s control, the new co-chair, daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, proudly announced, “As my father-in-law says, ‘bigly’ … We’re going to win!” The choice of Alabama Senator Katie Britt to deliver a “kitchen table” rebuttal also quickly turned sour. A schizoid of alternating styles and fabulist miss telling of gang rape, fact checkers went wild, including date (2023 vs. 2004), location (Mexico vs. USA), and president at the time (George W. Bush vs. Biden).
Loyal indeed, like zombies, Trump followers and the former Republican Party are following him into a basement, and are heading down a tunnel which has no end. It has been “a virtuoso performance without a grand finale”, unless, that is, it be the destruction of our democratic form of government.
Posted on | March 6, 2024 | 6 Comments
Mike Magee
Britt Cagle Grant, the 47-year old Federal Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit made news this week. The Stanford Law graduate, blessed by the Federalist Society and Leonard Leo, and former clerk of Hon. Brett Kavanaugh, was nominated by Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate on July 31, 2018.
Now six years later, on March 4, 2024, her words in rejecting DeSantis’s “Stop Woke Act” (otherwise known as the “Individual Freedom Measure”), are particularly crushing to her supporters: “By limiting its restrictions to a list of ideas designated as offensive, …it penalizes certain viewpoints — the greatest First Amendment sin. Banning speech on a wide variety of political topics is bad; banning speech on a wide variety of political viewpoints is worse.”
In a political universe, where choices are particularly binary, the Justice appeared to be exploring middle ground. When still a Presidential candidate in 2022, Ron DeSantis used the bill as the leading edge of a divisive campaign based on white nationalist victimization, stating, “No one should be instructed to feel as if they are not equal or shamed because of their race. In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces.”
Ron and Casey DeSantis have mirrored in many ways the fictional Barbie and Ken – soon to be featured in the 2024 Academy Awards where they have been nominated for eight Oscars. The comparison of Ron to Ken needs little explanation. And Casey herself is used to the glare of the public spotlight. The former host of PGA Tour Today who met her husband on the golf course and was married at Disney World is beautiful and smart as a whip. She graduated with a degree in Economics from the College of Charleston.
With this most recent turn of events, the DeSantis family seems to be following the plot line (with its twists and turns) of ‘Barbie’– this year’s favorite for 2024 Picture of the Year. And performing in that film you will find a female disrupter at least as prominent as Justice Grant.
I am speaking of the brilliant actress and nominee for Best Supporting Actress, America Ferrera, who played a 39 year old mother and Mattel employee, Gloria, and delivered what one film critique describes as “the ‘Barbie’ monologue we all talked about.” You can find the two minute speech in its entirety here, and it is well worth a listen. Ferrera herself described the big speech this way: “funny and subversive and delightfully weird.”
When I first heard the speech (as a husband of 54 years, father of a grown daughter and three daughters-in-law, grandfather of six granddaughters, and brother of six sisters) I choked up at one specific line – “It’s too hard.” It comes in the next to the last paragraph.
Here is “The Speech” with Gloria speaking to Barbie who is encountering the “real world.”:
“It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.
You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people.
You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining. You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood.
But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful.
You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.
I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.”
But in our binary world, is it enough to agree with Barbie when she suggests that “Naming the problem can break the spell?”
Or must we list again a litany of facts that document the harm done – 1 in 5 women victims of rape or attempted rape; epidemic (41%) domestic abuse and violence; unequal pay; forced birth enacted by male super-dominated Red State legislatures; absurd maternal/fetal mortality rates; no paid maternity leave; no universal preschool; Congress is 72% male; and I could go on. But I and many others have been this way before, in search of the right facts, the right message, to find the elusive “middle ground.”
Justice Grant’s appearance this week drew me back to March 24, 2005, when another Federal Justice from the Eleventh Circuit ruled for sanity in a Florida case, opposing both the Governor (Jeb Bush) and the President (George W. Bush). That Justice allowed Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube to be removed at a Pinellas Park hospice, where she died peacefully on March 31,2005.
Terri had struggled with a hidden eating disorder (a condition shared by 9% of Americans), which went undiscovered when she sought evaluation for infertility. On February 25, 1990, she collapsed in the lobby of their apartment in St. Petersburg, Florida. She was resuscitated but from that day forward remained in a “permanent vegetative state.” A epic 15 year “culture war” ensued before final Judicial relief was grudgingly earned.
Shouting from street side the day she died was Randall Terry, leader of Operation Rescue, who somehow believed that Schiavo had not suffered enough, and what our country needed was a heavy dose of “traditional masculinity,” defined by the American Psychological Association, in 2018 as a blend of “stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—and on the whole, harmful.”
Is there a middle to be found when it comes to the health of women in America? As our fictional Barbie suggests, if we believe that “naming the problem can break the spell,” perhaps others like Justice Britt Cagle Grant might unexpectedly come along. So let’s remain optimistic and continue to seek out and expand the middle by raising our voices as participants in this democracy. Otherwise, we are likely to witness other Terri Schiavo’s coming along, destined to die because being a woman in a Trumpist America is “just too hard.”.
Posted on | February 28, 2024 | 4 Comments
Mike Magee
For most loyalist Americans at the turn of the 19th century, Justice John Marshall Harlan’s decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905). was a “slam dunk.” In it, he elected to force a reluctant Methodist minister in Massachusetts to undergo Smallpox vaccination during a regional epidemic or pay a fine.
Justice Harlan wrote at the time: “Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own, whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”
What could possibly go wrong here? Of course, citizens had not fully considered the “unintended consequences,” let alone the presence of President Wilson and others focused on “strengthening the American stock.”
This involved a two-prong attack on “the enemy without” and “the enemy within.”
The The Immigration Act of 1924, signed by President Calvin Coolidge, was the culmination of an attack on “the enemy without.” Quotas for immigration were set according to the 1890 Census which had the effect of advantaging the selective influx of Anglo-Saxons over Eastern Europeans and Italians. Asians (except Japanese and Filipinos) were banned.
As for “the enemy within,” rooters for the cause of weeding out “undesirable human traits” from the American populace had the firm support of premier academics from almost every elite university across the nation. This came in the form of new departments focused on advancing the “Eugenics Movement,” an excessively discriminatory, quasi-academic approach based on the work of Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin.
Isolationists and Segregationists picked up the thread and ran with it focused on vulnerable members of the community labeled as paupers, mentally disabled, dwarfs, promiscuous or criminal.
In a strategy eerily reminiscent of that employed by Mississippi Pro-Life advocates in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2021, Dr. Albert Priddy, activist director of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, teamed up with radical Virginia state senator Aubrey Strode to hand pick and literally make a “federal case” out of a young institutionalized teen resident named Carrie Buck.
Their goal was to force the nation’s highest courts to sanction state sponsored mandated sterilization.
In a strange twist of fate, the Dobbs name was central to this case as well. That is because Carrie Buck was under the care of foster parents, John and Alice Dobbs, after Carrie’s mother, Emma, was declared mentally incompetent. At the age of 17, Carrie, after having been removed from school after the 6th grade to work as a domestic for the Dobbs, was raped by their nephew and gave birth to a daughter, Vivian. This lead to her mandated institutionalization, and subsequent official labeling as an “imbecile.”
In his majority decision supporting Dr. Priddy, Buck v. Bell, Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes leaned heavily on precedent. Reflecting his extreme bias, he wrote: “The principle that supports compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover the cutting of Fallopian tubes (Jacobson v. Massachusetts 197 US 11). Three generation of imbeciles are enough.”
Carrie Buck lived to age 76, had no mental illness, and read the Charlottesville, VA newspaper every day, cover to cover. There is no evidence that her mother Emma was mentally incompetent. Her daughter Vivian was an honor student, who died in the custody of the John and Alice Dobbs at the age of 8.
The deeply embedded roots of the prejudicial idea that inferiority (or otherness) is a biological construct was used to justify indentured servitude and enslaved Africans, and traces back to our very beginnings as a nation. Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, was not shy in declaring that his enslaved Africans were biologically distinguishable from land-holding whites. Channeling Eugenic activists a century later, the President noted his enslaved Africans suitability for brutal labor was based on their greater physiologic tolerance for plantation-level heat exposure, and lesser (required) kidney output.
Helen Burstin MD, CEO of the Council of Medical Specialty Societies, drew a direct line from those early days to the present day practice of medicine anchored in opaque decision support computerized algorithms. “It is mind-blowing in some ways how deeply embedded in history some of this misinformation is,” she said. She was talking about risk-prediction tools that are commercial and proprietary, and utilized for opaque oversight of “roughly 200 million U.S. citizens per year.” Originally designed for health insurance prior approval systems and managed care decisions, they now provide underpinning for new AI super-charged personalized medicine decision support systems.
Documented racially constructed clinical guidelines have been uncovered and some rewritten over the past few years. They include obstetrical guidelines that disadvantaged black mothers seeking vaginal birth over Caesarian Section, and limitations on treatment of black children with fever and acute urinary tract infection, as just two examples. Other studies uncovered reinforcement of myths that “black people have higher pain thresholds,” greater strength, and resistance to disease – all in support of their original usefulness as slave laborers. If racism has found a way historically to insinuate itself into these tools, is it unreasonable to believe that committed Christian Nationalists might do the same to control women’s health autonomy?
Can’t we just make a fresh start on clinical guidelines? Sadly, it is not that easy. As James Baldwin famously wrote, “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” The explosion of technologic advance in health care has the potential to trap the bad with the good, as vast databases are fed into hungry machines indiscriminately.
Computing power, genomic databases, EMR’s, natural language processing, machine based learning, generative AI, and massive multimodal downloads bury our historic biases and errors under multi-layered camouflage, and leave plenty of room for invisible inserts by the Leonard Leo’s of the world.
Modern day Dobb-ists have now targeted vulnerable women and children using carefully constructed legal cases and running them all the way up to the Supreme Court. This strategy was joined with a second approach (MAGA Republican take-over’s of state legislatures). Together they are intended to ban abortion, explore contraceptive restrictions, eliminate fertility therapy, and criminalize the practice of medicine. It is one more simple step to require encodement of these restrictions on medical freedom and autonomy into binding clinical protocols.
In an age where local bureaucrats are determined to “play doctor”, and modern day jurists are determined to provide cover for a third wave of protocol encoded Dobb-ists, “the enemy without” runs the risk of becoming “the enemy within.”
Posted on | February 17, 2024 | 2 Comments
Mike Magee
You would need a mountain of psychiatrists to explain why Trump is the way he is, and an army of scholars to help us understand why Republican leaders, in state and federal positions, have decided to follow this piper’s call.
Which brings me to a well known parable, described below by AI enabled Bing Copilot:
“In the town of Hamelin, during the year 1284, a rat infestation plagued the streets. The townspeople were desperate for a solution. That’s when a mysterious figure appeared—a piper dressed in multicolored (“pied”) clothing. He claimed to be a rat-catcher and promised to rid the town of its vermin.
The mayor, eager to be rid of the rats, struck a deal with the piper. He pledged to pay the piper 1,000 guilders in exchange for his services. The piper accepted and began to play his magic pipe. The enchanting music drew the rats out of their hiding places, and they followed him to the River Weser. There, they drowned, leaving Hamelin rat-free.
However, when it came time to pay the piper, the mayor reneged on his promise. He reduced the payment to a mere 50 guilders and accused the piper of bringing the rats himself as part of an extortion scheme.
Enraged by this betrayal, the piper vowed revenge. On Saint John and Paul’s day, while the adults were attending church, he returned to Hamelin. This time, he was dressed in green like a hunter and played his pipe once more. The haunting melody captivated the town’s children, and 130 of them followed him out of the town and into a mysterious cave.”
In my reading of the parable, the piper is Trump, whose magical tune is addictive, infective, and destructive. He has been hired by the mayor(s), an array of powerful Republican party elite, who, after realizing they couldn’t beat the piper, assumed that they could control him, and use his magnetism to convert long term goals into short term victories. And for four years, from 2016 to 2020, they were right. But the piper’s vision and thirst for revenge, for a million slights and offenses by these fawning elites, never relinquished his dream of ultimate power. Instead, he continued to plow along with his pipe, the one that first attracted the rats (low hanging, ethically compromised, low-lifes like Reps. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) and Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) who would soon be indicted), and then returned in 2023, tooting the same song from the same horn, drawing Republican “children” out of their political chambers and into a mysterious cave, unreachable to support immigration reform, oppressed women, or even a beleaguered Ukraine on its soon-to-be last dying breath.
On June 11, 1944, another presidential piper, the supremely popular 4-term leader FDR, knew well how to use his song to bring along our citizens. On that day, he promised a “Second Bill of Rights” stating that the original was now “inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness…Necessitous men are not free,” he said.
Harvard-trained moral philosopher Susan Neiman PhD recalled those words recently in calling for “a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress.”
She also recalled the work product of Eleanor Roosevelt who guided the creation of the UN’s “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” which she herself admitted is “a declaration that remains aspirational.” Signed by 150 nations, it remains the most translated document in the world.
Embedded in the declaration is a broad and inclusive definition of health. It reads “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Most especially, Eleanor Roosevelt highlighted that “Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.”
And yet, as Trump blows his horn from multiple court house steps, in the post-Dobbs era, a recent March of Dimes report states that “maternal deaths are on the rise, with the rate doubling between 2018 to 2021 from 17.4 to 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births.”
Susan Neiman sees the problem as deeply embedded in America’s culture and politics where guideposts and philosophical values are being dismantled. Cast in this light, the failed U.S. health care system is systematically broken and highly discriminatory at best.
When the piper of Hamelin first led the rats into the river, it was alarmingly easy, and left a wide opening for his next steps. The vacuum left by an erosion of justice is always filled with power – and specifically, power over someone. The targets of Trump’s power play continue to be women, children, and people of color in America, and the established Republican party. But in the next trip to the river, he believes his ultimate target is within his grasp – it is our Democracy.
Posted on | February 13, 2024 | 2 Comments
Mike Magee
Over the past year, the general popularization of AI or Artificial Intelligence has captured the world’s imagination. Of course, academicians often emphasize historical context. But entrepreneurs tend to agree with Thomas Jefferson who said, “I like dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”
This particular dream however is all about language, its standing and significance in human society. Throughout history, language has been a species accelerant, a secret power that has allowed us to dominate and rise quickly (for better or worse) to the position of “masters of the universe.”
Well before ChatGPT became a household phrase, there was LDT or the laryngeal descent theory. It professed that humans unique capacity for speech was the result of a voice box, or larynx, that is lower in the throat than other primates. This permitted the “throat shape, and motor control” to produce vowels that are the cornerstone of human speech. Speech – and therefore language arrival – was pegged to anatomical evolutionary changes dated at between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago.
That theory, as it turns out, had very little scientific evidence. And in 2019, a landmark study set about pushing the date of primate vocalization back to at least 3 to 5 million years ago. As scientists summarized it in three points: “First, even among primates, laryngeal descent is not uniquely human. Second, laryngeal descent is not required to produce contrasting formant patterns in vocalizations. Third, living nonhuman primates produce vocalizations with contrasting formant patterns.”
Language and speech in the academic world are complex fields that go beyond paleoanthropology and primatology. If you want to study speech science, you better have a working knowledge of “phonetics, anatomy, acoustics and human development” say the experts. You could add to this “syntax, lexicon, gesture, phonological representations, syllabic organization, speech perception, and neuromuscular control.”
Professor Paul Pettitt, who makes a living at the University of Oxford interpreting ancient rock paintings in Africa and beyond, sees the birth of civilization in multimodal language terms. He says, “There is now a great deal of support for the notion that symbolic creativity was part of our cognitive repertoire as we began dispersing from Africa. Google chair, Sundar Pichai, maintains a similarly expansive view when it comes to language. In his December 6, 2023, introduction of their ground breaking LLM (large language model), Gemini (a competitor of ChatGPT), he described the new product as “our largest and most capable AI model with natural image, audio and video understanding and mathematical reasoning.”
Digital Cognitive Strategist, Mark Minevich, echoed Google’s view that the torch of human language had now gone well beyond text alone and had been passed to machines. His review: “Gemini combines data types like never before to unlock new possibilities in machine learning… Its multimodal nature builds on, yet goes far beyond, predecessors like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in its ability to understand our complex world dynamically.”
GPT what???
O.K. Let’s take a step back, and give us all a chance to catch-up.
What we call AI or “artificial intelligence” is a 70-year old concept that used to be called “deep learning.” This was the brain construct of University of Chicago research scientists Warren McCullough and Walter Pitts, who developed the concept of “neural nets” in 1944, modeling the theoretical machine learner after human brains, consistent of multiple overlapping transit fibers, joined at synaptic nodes which, with adequate stimulus could allow gathered information to pass on to the next fiber down the line.
On the strength of that concept, the two moved to MIT in 1952 and launched the Cognitive Science Department uniting computer scientists and neuroscientists. In the meantime, Frank Rosenblatt, a Cornell psychologist, invented the “first trainable neural network” in 1957 termed by him futuristically, the “Perceptron” which included a data input layer, a sandwich layer that could adjust information packets with “weights” and “firing thresholds”, and a third output layer to allow data that met the threshold criteria to pass down the line.
Back at MIT, the Cognitive Science Department was in the process of being hijacked in 1969 by mathematicians Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, and became the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. They summarily trashed Rosenblatt’s Perceptron machine believing it to be underpowered and inefficient in delivering the most basic computations. By 1980, the department was ready to deliver a “never mind,” as computing power grew and algorithms for encoding thresholds and weights at neural nodes became efficient and practical.
The computing leap, experts now agree, came “courtesy of the computer-game industry” whose “graphics processing unit” (GPU), which housed thousands of processing cores on a single chip, was effectively the neural net that McCullough and Pitts had envisioned. By 1977, Atari had developed game cartridges and microprocessor-based hardware, with a successful television interface.
With the launch of the Internet, and the commercial explosion of desk top computing, language – that is the fuel for human interactions worldwide – grew exponentially in importance. More specifically, the greatest demand was for language that could link humans to machines in a natural way.
With the explosive growth of text data, the focus initially was on Natural Language Processing (NLP), “an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and linguistics primarily concerned with giving computers the ability to support and manipulate human language.” Training software initially used annotated or referenced texts to address or answer specific questions or tasks precisely. The usefulness and accuracy to address inquiries outside of their pre-determined training was limited and inefficiency undermined their usage.
But computing power had now advanced far beyond what Warren McCullough and Walter Pitts could have possibly imagined in 1944, while the concept of “neural nets” couldn’t be more relevant. IBM describes the modern day version this way:
“Neural networks …are a subset of machine learning and are at the heart of deep learning algorithms. Their name and structure are inspired by the human brain, mimicking the way that biological neurons signal to one another… Artificial neural networks are comprised of node layers, containing an input layer, one or more hidden layers, and an output layer…Once an input layer is determined, weights are assigned. These weights help determine the importance of any given variable, with larger ones contributing more significantly to the output compared to other inputs. All inputs are then multiplied by their respective weights and then summed. Afterward, the output is passed through an activation function, which determines the output. If that output exceeds a given threshold, it “fires” (or activates) the node, passing data to the next layer in the network… it’s worth noting that the “deep” in deep learning is just referring to the depth of layers in a neural network. A neural network that consists of more than three layers—which would be inclusive of the inputs and the output—can be considered a deep learning algorithm. A neural network that only has two or three layers is just a basic neural network.”
The bottom line is that the automated system responds to an internal logic. The computers “next choice” is determined by how well it fits in with the prior choices. And it doesn’t matter where the words or “coins” come from. Feed it data, and it will “train” itself; and by following the rules or algorithms imbedded in the middle decision layers or screens, it will “transform” the acquired knowledge, into “generated” language that both human and machine understand.
In 2016, a group of tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk and Reed Hastings, believing AI could go astray if restricted or weaponized, formed a non-profit called OpenAI. Two years later they released a deep learning product called Chat GPT. This solution was born out of the marriage of Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning Neural Links with a stated goal of “enabling humans to interact with machines in a more natural way.”
The GPT stood for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer.” Built into the software was the ability to “consider the context of the entire sentence when generating the next word” – a tactic known as “auto-regressive.” As a “self-supervised learning model,” GPT is able to learn by itself from ingesting or inputing huge amounts of anonymous text; transform it by passing it through a variety of intermediary weighed screens that jury the content; and allow passage (and survival) of data that is validated. The resultant output? High output language that mimics human text.
Leadership in Microsoft was impressed, and in 2019 ponied up $1 billion to jointly participate in development of the product and serve as their exclusive Cloud provider.
The first GPT released by OpenAI was GPT-1 in 2018. It was trained on an enormous BooksCorpus dataset. Its’ design included an input and output layer, with 12 successive transformer layers sandwiched in between. It was so effective in Natural Language Processing that minimal fine tuning was required on the back end.
One year later, OpenAI released version two, called GPT-2, which was 10 times the size of its predecessor with 1.5 billion parameters, and the capacity to translate and summarize. A year later GPT-3 was released in 2020. It had now grown to 175 billion parameters, 100 times the size of GPT-2, and was trained by ingesting a corpus of 500 billion content sources (including those of my own book – CODE BLUE). It could now generate long passages on verbal demand, do basic math, write code, and do (what the inventors describe as) “clever tasks.” An intermediate GPT 3.5 absorbed Wikipedia entries, social media posts and news releases.
On March 14, 2023, GPT-4 went big language, now with multimodal outputs including text, speech, images, and physical interactions with the environment. This represents an exponential convergence of multiple technologies including databases, AI, Cloud Computing, 5G networks, personal Edge Computing, and more.
The New York Times headline announced it as “Exciting and Scary.” Their technology columnist wrote, “What we see emerging are machines that know how to reason, are adept at all human languages, and are able to perceive and interact with the physical environment.” He was not alone in his concerns. The Atlantic, at about the same time , ran an editorial titled, “AI is about to make social media (much) more toxic.
Leonid Zhukov, Ph.D, director of the Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) Global AI Institute, believes offerings like ChatGPT-4 and Genesis have the potential to become the brains of autonomous agents—which don’t just sense but also act on their environment—in the next 3 to 5 years. This could pave the way for fully automated workflows.”
Were he alive, Leonardo da Vinci, would likely be unconcerned. Five hundred years ago, he wrote nonchalantly, “It had long come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”
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