Mediaboss Marketing

Jun 27, 2022, 9:41pmUpdated 29m ago

By: John Craven

Connecticut Democrats are hoping anger over the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will translate into votes, but will the issue make a difference at the ballot box?

On Monday, Gov. Ned Lamont launched a campaign adpromising to keep abortion legal and accessible. He also took a swing at his Republican opponent, Bob Stefanowski.

"I think it's top of mind, said Lamont. People want to know where you stand. Are you going to call for restrictions on Roe v. Wade or not?"

Stefanowski says abortion is a non-issue in Connecticut because it's codified in state law although he does support adding a parental consent requirement for kids under 16.

"Democrats are going to want to do a lot of fear mongering on this issue in Connecticut. It's part of the law, it's not going to change, said Stefanowski. They don't want to talk about inflation, they don't want to talk about gas prices."

So are abortion rights really at risk in Connecticut?

In the General Assembly, many Republicans are pro-choice. In fact, Stefanowski's running mate, Rep. Laura Devlin, recently voted to expand abortion access. But the state Senate president has a warning.

"The Republican party itself is becoming more and more conservative, said state Sen. Martin Looney (D-New Haven). So I don't know whether all those more moderate Republicans are likely to continue in office."

This year's Republican primary for U.S. Senate could be a litmus test. Themis Klarides, who received the party endorsement, is vocally pro-choice. But her two opponents, Leora Levy and Peter Lumaj, oppose abortion.

But with the November elections four months away, will abortion still motivate voters? Some political analysts think inflation will remain the dominant focus.

"You know, there's only so much voters can do, said Dr. Jonathan Wharton with Southern Connecticut State University. Because this is really a Supreme Court decision that was handed down, so it's not like the voters can decide on the judges."

Read more:
Connecticut Democrats campaign on Roe decision, but will it sway voters? - News 12 New Jersey

(The Hill) Justice Clarence Thomas concurrent opinion calling on the Supreme Court to reconsider landmark cases protecting access to contraceptives and LGBTQ rights is striking fear among Democrats, with many worried about how far the conservative court will go after it took the extraordinary step of reversing Roe v. Wade.

In his concurring opinion to Fridays ruling, Thomas wrote that in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Courts substantive due process precedents, arguing that the Constitutions Due Process Clause did not secure a right to abortion or any other substantive rights.

Fridays majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito said Roe should be reversed because the right to an abortion is not protected by the Due Process Clause in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

Thomas made it crystal clear exactly what rights he was considering by naming cases explicitly, listing Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision that allowed married couples to access contraceptives; Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 case that barred states from outlawing consensual gay sex, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 ruling that made same-sex marriage a constitutional right.

Alito, writing for the courts majority, wrote that in overturning Roe v. Wade, the court was not advocating for changing those other rulings.

But critics of the court on the left have noted that few thought Roe v. Wade itself was in jeopardy five years ago and suggest it is unclear how a future conservative court will move forward.

Democrats have highlighted the Thomas concurrent opinion, arguing it makes clear his own plans.

If you read what is very clear one of the Justices had his own statement: its about contraception, in vitro fertilization, family planning, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at a Friday press availability where she denounced the ruling. That is all what will spring from their decision that they made today.

The courts liberal justices offered a similar warning.

No one should be confident that this majority is done with its work, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan wrote in a joint dissent.

The rightRoeandCaseyrecognized does not stand alone. To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation, they added.

The swift changes to American life from Fridays decision have been stunning to many.

As of Friday, nine states had banned abortion, according to theGuttmacher Institute.

On Sunday, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, said she would move to ban abortion pills delivered online. Other states are expected to make similar moves.

Thomas, who was nominated by President George H. W. Bush more than 30 years ago and isconsideredby some to be the most conservative justice on the bench, in his concurrent said the court must correct the error of the three landmark cases he mentioned.

Because any substantive due process decision is demonstrably erroneous, we have a duty to correct the error established in those precedents, he wrote.

Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), chairman of the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus, said the current moment is a dangerous time for individuals who hold human rights and civil liberties in high regard.

They are taking away rights that people in this country enjoyed. And I think anyone who cares about any marginalized community, like the LGBTQ community, has to be alarmed at both the Supreme Courts willingness to complete[ly] disrupt, disregard precedent, and secondly, to remove basic fundamental rights that citizens of this country have enjoyed for decades, he said. So this is a very dangerous time for people who care about human rights and civil liberties.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), in an interview withMSNBCoutside the Supreme Court on Saturday, said the ruling overturning Roe is part of extremist Republicans long-term agenda.

This is part of a long-term agenda of the far-right extremist Republicans to begin to erode our democratic rights starting with, of course, our right to reproductive freedom and our personal liberties, Lee, a vice chair of the LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus, said.

Theyre not gonna stop there, whats next? Same-sex marriage. Whats next? Voting rights, could be, banning interracial marriages. Who knows where theyre going, she added.

Democrats have hoped that outrage with the decision on Roe v. Wade and fear of rights the court might go after next could energize their voters ahead of this falls midterm elections.

Republicans, who have been feeling confident about winning back the House majority and quite possibly the Senate, believe the focus of voters will remain on inflation and high gas prices.

But there have been statements from the right indicating a wariness of how the courts direction might reverberate.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday said Alito had set the right tone, implicitly pushing back at the message from. Thomas.

He said nothing in this decision puts those cases at risk, Graham said during an appearance on Fox News Sunday, referring to the cases mentioned by Thomas.

The reason he decided that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided is because it deals with the potential for life, the senator said.

These other privacy issues like contraception do not deal with the potential for life, the senator said. He made a distinction between same-sex marriage and contraception, which I think will win the day over time.

Follow this link:
Thomas opinion strikes fear in Democrats over how far court will go - WANE

It is unconscionable that your administration, amid the heartbreaking supply crisis, chose to destroy perfectly good baby formula, read the letter.

It was signed by many of the states most prominent Democrats, including state Sen. Jen Jordan, the partys nominee for attorney general, and state Rep. Bee Nguyen, the nominee for secretary of state.

Georgia adopted the policy in 2019 in response to guidance from the federal Department of Agriculture that advised against donating returned products, even if they were unopened and unexpired, for safety reasons.

State health officials say theyre now working to boost the formula supply and provide community food programs with extra stock. Georgia has also secured federal waivers to give needy families more options to buy the formula.

The letter from the Democrats, who each support Kemp challenger Stacey Abrams, demands more aggressive initiatives to stem the shortage.

As legislators, but also as mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, and caregivers, we are calling on you to speak directly to the people of Georgia about this crisis, it read, and take immediate action to resolve it.

Kemps campaign said Democrats shouldnt blame others for the disastrous failures of the Biden administration and used the letter to blast his November opponent.

Abrams took credit for Bidens win and far-left agenda and shes not going to be able to run from it this November, said Kemp spokesman Tate Mitchell.

Continued here:
Georgia Democrats blast Kemp over 'heartbreaking' baby formula shortage - The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Rigetti and Riverlane Receive a 500 Thousand ($613K USD) Grant to Work on Error Correction

Rigetti Computing and Riverlane have received this grant from Innovate UK, the UKs national innovation agency, to study syndrome extraction on superconducting quantum computers. This would be a critical step for providing error correction on the qubits in a fault tolerant quantum computer. Since a qubit cannot be measured directly without collapsing quantum error correction circuits have to be made more complex than their classical counterparts. A common method is to include additional qubits in the circuit called ancilla (or auxiliary) qubits that can be entangled with the data qubits and subsequently measured to form a syndrome pattern. This syndrome pattern can indicate if there is an error within the data qubits and what qubits are affected. Additional gates can then be applied to the data qubits based upon the syndrom to fix the data qubits and correct the errors. The beauty of this approach is that while the ancilla qubits are measured the data qubits are not measured so they remain in the quantum state and dont collapse. This research from Rigetti and Riverlane will explore ways of implementing this error correction process while minimizing any additional errors that could result from the syndrome extraction process itself. For more about this grant and research project, you can view a press release located here.

June 27, 2022

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Read this article:
Rigetti and Riverlane Receive a 500 Thousand ($613K USD) Grant to Work on Error Correction - Quantum Computing Report

Its been a nightmare couple months for cryptocurrency investors. Theyve watched their Bitcoin BTC holdings hemorrhage 70 percent of their value since the record high of $69,000 back in November. Overall, theyve suffered crypto losses totaling more than half (55%) of capitalization, or an estimated market loss of $2 trillion.

The days when crypto enthusiasts could talk about crypto as if Bitcoin were the new reserve currency, or the digital equivalent of the gold standard, or even a transformation of what it means to invest, are over. Crypto looks more like a classic boom and bust investment, like Dutch tulips, rather than the next best hope for humanity.

PARIS, FRANCE - FEBRUARY 06: In this photo illustration, a visual representation of the digital ... [+] Cryptocurrency, (Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images)

As I warned in an earlier Forbes column, the crypto boom was driven by systematic policy failures by major central banks. As long as they made bad decisions about monetary supply or failed to take on inflation, cryptocurrencies were going to look like solid investments. As soon as central banks shook off their inertia, crypto values started heading south. Meanwhile, the threat of regulation of the crypto marketregulations that might strangle the Bitcoin goosehas raised additional uncertainties about where the market is headed, and whether it pays to buy low nowor run for the hills.

Nonetheless, as Bloomberg reports, venture capitalists still want in the crypto game. Theyre being smart. They sense that despite the burst bubble since January, cryptocurrencies will be here to stay. They may not save humanity from itself, as some thought, but they remain a valuable speculative instrument but also a store of value when other investments look uncertain or too volatile to handle.

At the same time, Bitcoin and crypto do offer a deeper secret that is important to the rest of humanity. That secret isnt what they do, but how they do it. i.e. with Distributed Ledger Technology or blockchain.

An abstract digital structure showing the concept of blockchain technology with hexadecimal hash ... [+] data inside each block.

We can think of blockchain as an enormous spreadsheet thats reproduced thousands of times across a network of computers, that regularly updates the spreadsheet and its common database. The growing list of records in the ledger, called blocks, are linked or chained together to all previous blocks of transactions, using a cryptographic fingerprint known as a hash. Each transaction is independently verified and confirmed by peer-to-peer computer networks, time-stamped, and then added to the distributed ledger. Once recorded, the data cannot be alteredand its only shared with those who are part of the encrypted ledger.

Former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton has predicted that blockchain is the future of our financial markets, including digital currencies. High-tech guru George Gilder sums up the future of blockchain this way: Even though bitcoin may not, after all, represent the potential for a new gold standard, its underlying technology will unbundle the roles of money. Blockchain may even represent the future of the Internet.

There is, however, a cloud hovering over the DLT future, a quantum cloud.

This column pointed out back in 2018 that DLT was vulnerable to future quantum computer attack. Our latest report from the Quantum Alliance Initiative at the Hudson Institute, gives some idea of the cost of such a future quantum computer assault. Our econometric calculations indicate that such an attack would amount to $1.8 trillion in direct losses, with an additional loss of $1.4 trillion in indirect impacts. Taken together, a successful quantum computer decryption of cryptocurrencys most valuable assetits blockchain encryptionwould result in a $3.34 trillion hit on the U.S. economy, with negative ripple effects across the global economy for a long time to come.

Stablecoins doesnt fare any better in this scenario. Since these crypto instruments are pegged to 1:1 ratios with fiat currencies, the resulting liquidity crunch as margin calls come due and banks scramble to cover losses, means they too become quantum road kill.

Whats the answer? As weve mentioned in other columns, crypto companies need to adopt quantum-safe encryption to protect their future. That means either installing post-quantum cryptographic algorithms like the ones being standardized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology or turning to quantum-based cryptography, which uses quantum random number generators and quantum key distribution to create hack-proof communication links across the ledger.

There are even quantum security companies that offer both.

Likewise, it would make sense for a government regulatory crypto regime to require installing quantum-safe solutions for the entire industry. Making cryptocurrencies quantum secure could even set the next cryptographic standard for the rest of the financial sector, from banks to equity and credit markets.

Either way, the future of blockchain, like the future of crypto, hangs in the balance. So will the future of the U.S. economy, unless we start getting smart about the quantum threat to come.

Go here to read the rest:
Can Crypto Still Save The World? - Forbes