Yes, it’s still a beautiful world in many respects. So as we head into the holidays with visions of impeachments dancing in our heads, let us rejoice that: we are not in a nuclear war; Donald Trump has not assumed dictatorial powers; William Barr is about to resign in disgrace;* Adam Schiff has not been assassinated (as of this writing); Russia has not annexed the whole of Ukraine; New York City is still above sea level; more than a dozen elephants remain in the wild; Ruth Bader Ginsburg lives on; and Artificial Intelligence has still not determined that it’s worth taking over this messy, irrational, bigotry-infested world.
You have much to be thankful for. You can be thankful that, despite much Fox News/National Enquirer-generated fake news, we do not have on our southern border hordes of raping, thieving, murderous people itching to invade the U.S. and take away our jobs; Ukraine is not hacking our elections although Russia has and is; a non-negligible number of Americans actually understand the value of the rule of law; wind turbines do not cause cancer; the mainstream media are not Enemies of the People; vaccines do not cause autism; Hillary Clinton is not running a child sex ring; a majority of Americans actually do believe that guns kill people; George Soros has no plan to undermine the American political system.
Are you guilty if you don’t know right from wrong?
Not being a lawyer, I don’t know if the inability to tell right from wrong is a sign of insanity. What I know of it comes from TV shows, movies, and written fiction. In those cases not knowing right from wrong is a symptom of either insanity or serious mental defect, which exempts the defendant for responsibility for their acts.
This line of thinking appears to be the line which the defenders of the President are taking. Trump said the phone call was “perfect”—that’s the one where he was shaking down the president of Ukraine for political purposes.
The Republican defenders are now casting this manipulation of the newly elected president of a vulnerable, militarily dependent ally as a proper exercise of diplomacy. No matter that this is preposterous—when you are forced to defend the indefensible, any weapon that comes to hand is better than nothing.
It boils down to, the President gets a pass because he didn’t know what he was doing was wrong. Based on a life in which Donald Trump has been largely unaccountable for his actions, this is perfectly plausible.
By now you have likely heard of a report recently publishedin theAnnals of Internal Medicinethat concludes “there’s no need to reduce red or processed meat consumption for good health,” as summarized in the Washington Post.
Beef: good (for protein), bad (for the environment, and probably for health), and kinda ugly (for aesthetics, if that matters)
Kaboom! Went the plunge of this report into the midst of what had been a gathering consensus about the many ill effects of a meat-heavy diet.
RECOMMENDATION: before you read the full Washington Post piece, first read its last two paragraphs (beginning with “Willettt says the panel’s conclusions and recommendations do not reflect the study’s findings . . .” – emphasis mine). They indicate that the editorial board of the Annalsetc. have spun the data in favor of the red and processed meat industry. In the editorial itself, the writers bury concerns about the environmental impacts of meat consumption in the final paragraph.
If you read the complete piece in the Post, you will see that the conventional nutritional wisdom, that it’s healthier to eat less meat, still has solid support among almost all nutritionists. Walter Willett pointed out that the study itself associates moderate reduction in meat production with a 13 percent lower mortality, and said, “if a drug brought down the number of deaths to that degree . . . it would be heralded as a success.” Certainly such a drug would be heralded as a success by a multi-billion dollar drug company. There is no multi-billion dollar profit-making enterprise to curb the consumption of red meat.
Once the media, always on the hunt for controversy, had taken up the report it went mainstream (as in the Washington Post, the New York Times etc.) accompanied by a glut of social media chatter. And then came a firestorm of backlash such as you can read of in a litany of objections from nutritionists, doctors, and researchers found on this page of WebMd.
The study is tainted by past ties of one of the research’s co-leaders to an industry trade group, the “International Life Sciences Institute” (ILSI)—a connection he did not disclose because technically the connection did not fall within the past-3-year reporting requirement for publication. While the earlier study—which incidentally was an attempt to allay health concerns about sugar additives—was published in December 2016 (less than 3 years ago), researcher Bradley Johnston said he was paid for the research in 2015 (more than 3 years ago). Ergo he was not obliged to disclose the connection because the payment fell outside the 3-year window. . . . Did he really think this was not going to come out? Did he really think that no one would suspect he might be eyeing future funding by the ILSI, having insinuated himself further into their good graces with the red meat study? Maybe in the context of runaway mendacity and moral obtuseness in the twenty-teens he saw no reason to observe the spirit of disclosure rules.
Lots of people—too many—like to pick and choose which science to believe. Don’t just blame climate change deniers. By “lots of people” I mean those who do not recognize the value of real natural science.
According to the New Yorker, astrology is on the rise among millennials who profess to believe in science. Seventy-four percent of Cosmo readers are “obsessed” with astrology. See:
The resurgence has been fueled by fake news/fake information/fake science on the Internet.
Of course there are astrology “apps.”
Some people are making a lot of money out of this. I wonder if they support fellow charlatan Donald Trump who goes by the notion of truth as something you repeat so often that people believe it.
We have desperate humanitarian crises in the Middle East and Africa, and people are throwing their money at astrology.
Is this harmless? No; first because it leads folks to believe in just anything that pops up on the internet that suits their fancy. If they can believe in astrology, why not space aliens? Secondly, it can lead people to make bad decisions—buy a car they can’t afford, marry a criminal, vote for a demagogue, put their children in a school that teaches evolution is a hoax . . . . You name it. All dangerous.
Science denial is a perilous road into the shadows.
[WARNING: many readers may find the following a downer—but if you care about facts, you must be willing to look at all kinds of Inconvenient Truths.]
U.S. public on climate change: a crisis in name only
The September 20th Global Climate Strike has been inspiring—for those seriously concerned about global warming and climate change.
It’s less inspiring to read of how not-serious most of the American public is. A week before the Climate Strike, the release of a Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll headlined “Americans increasingly see climate change as a crisis” appeared to portend a sea change (pun partially intended) in attitudes toward climate change.
Read on for what underlies appearances.
The takeaway from the poll is that the public says, big problem—let somebody else take care of it. Consider that 38% describe climate change as “a crisis,” and another 38% describe it as “a major problem but not a crisis.” However, to combat climate change only 37% say major sacrifices will be required, 48% say minor sacrifices, 14% “not requiring much sacrifice,” with 1% having no opinion.
Next we read that “nearly half of adults say they would be willing to pay a $2 monthly tax on electricity to help combat climate change.” If that sounds promising, the report says just 27% would pay $10 extra a month. Meaning that at best 27/38 (71%) is the fraction of those saying the threat is “a crisis” would also pay $10 extra a month. $120 a year. Hmmm . . . 33¢/day = a bit more than 1/6th the price of a “tall” cup of Starbucks coffee. Now that’s what I call a major sacrifice!
Looming over the verbal skirmishes concerning Iran’s recent attack on the Saudi oil facilities and Mike Pompeo’s calling the attack “an act of war” is the fundamental problem that Donald Trump has created: putting himself between a rock and a hard place. There’s no wriggling out of it without either losing face or getting into a hot war with Iran, which would incur the involvement of Russia and the Chinese—too hot for Donald Trump to handle.
At this point, the end result appears to have been a loss of face—not that Donald Trump would ever admit it. The Treasury Department is to clamp down further on Iran’s financial system—somewhat short of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric. This will wreak further havoc on Iran’s economy, but if the Iranian government asks its people to make big sacrifices to oppose the U.S., they will be ready to starve rather than knuckle under.
We saw a similarTrumpian backpedaling from explosive rhetoric back in July of 2018 as Trump, personally aggrieved by standard Iranian bluster, thundered back at Hassan Rouhani with threats of annihilation.
In his inaugural address in 2017, Donald Trump railed against “American Carnage”—meaning principally street crime, considered a greater threat to our republic than Russian election interference, the crushing of the middle and lower classes by an ever-ascendant plutocracy, and the slow-rolling catastrophe of global warming.
Now that we have seen literal carnage in the bloodbath in El Paso—merely the most recent and conspicuous manifestation of white supremacist violence exacerbated by Donald Trump’s words themselves—we were also to hear, on August 5th, President Trump mechanically droning a teleprompted message condemning racial hatred and bigotry, and even white supremacy.
Hah! Who believes that? Certainly not his core followers—it was the telltale tone similar to that of a juvenile delinquent forced to say morally proper things that told them he didn’t really mean it in his heart of hearts. Certainly not his myrmidon Stephen Miller, who in fact wants to go so far as to bar immigration by anyone with the wrong skin color.
The argument against impeaching Donald Trump gets stronger every day. Check out liberal pundit Nathan Robinson giving pro-impeachment liberals a scolding in the pages of The Guardian. Robinson is wrong that impeachment of Trump is a bad idea. But he’s right that counting on Mueller’s congressional testimony to turn public opinion in favor of impeachment was foolish. Polls still find support for impeachment below 40 percent among the general population, although above 60 percent among Democrats. Mueller’s testimony didn’t change many minds on either side of the partisan divide, and the center has seemed not to care very much before, during, and after.
In making the case against impeachment, Robinson trots out the tiresome argument that “the Democratic obsession with the Mueller investigation was symptomatic of a party that has lost touch with the real concerns of working people.” Again, Robinson is both wrong and right. Wrong that the party has lost touch with the real concerns of working people. (He knows better—he’s just venting.) But he’s correct that the hype of the Mueller report—primarily on the Left—has given the appearance of a party that has lost touch. That’s not the fault of the Democratic Party, it’s the fault of the media that thrive on whipping up emotions. Their best bet for ratings has been to run juicy Trump-outrage stories to get the liberal tribe thirsting for blood.
Claim: climate “alarmism” is a hoax, carbon dioxide is good—and the victim of a conspiracy
The climate change denier on President Trump’s Security Council who possesses the most conspicuously solid scientific credentials is one William Happer, who received a PhD in physics at Princeton in 1964, and attained high standing in the physics community for his work on optics and atomic physics—not, however, climate. His contrarian stance on climate change has some fellow physicists scratching their heads, muttering “who got to this guy?”
In fairness, one should note that Happer does not exactly dispute the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. What he disputes is that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and the resultant climate change will be as severe as “alarmists” claim . . . and to the slight extent that CO2 does modify climate, it’s a good thing. And that good thing, in his view, is under malicious assault. He is prone to such provocative catchphrases as “the demonization of CO2,” “we are in a CO2 famine,” and “if plants could vote, they’d vote for coal.”
Yes! Plants would vote for coal! Or not. Plants were thriving in the Carboniferous Period, which is when they were also dying en masse, piling up in peat which was eventually compressed into what we call fossil fuels today: coal, petroleum, and natural gas. It was also a time of heavy competition between plant species in what we might call the Survival of the Vegetative Fittest—so that for any individual plant or species, the Carboniferous might not have looked quite like Paradise on Earth. It might have seemed, to some light-starved, struggling seedling on the forest floor enshrouded in the gloom shed by a dense canopy of enormous trees, more like a dungeon.
Longtime readers of this blog who may have tired of my ruminations about AI imposing absolute reign over humanity should be overjoyed to hear that I am dropping the apocalyptic Artificial Intelligence thread for the foreseeable future.
That’s becausethis article in New Scientisthas put my fears (mostly) to rest, with one of the pioneers of Deep Learning, Yoshua Bengio, saying, “[the machines] don’t even have the intelligence of a 6-month-old.” He is even quoted as saying “AIs are really dumb”—essentially answering my very question. Thanks Yoshua!
Bengio expresses himself in deceptively simple language, but that’s an exercise in humility, because . . .
Bengio is a recipient of the A.M. Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize of computing,” which gives his opinions great authority. He’s one of the originators of “deep learning,” that combines advanced hardware with state-of-the-art software enabling machines to train themselves to solve problems. Bengios’s high standing is enough to persuade me not to worry to excess until a contradictory view by an equally qualified AI expert comes out. Most of those sounding alarms about AI Apocalypse are not computer scientists, no matter how smart they are. Elon Musk, for example, discovered that robots in his Tesla factory were making stupid mistakes, and concluded, “human intelligence is underrated.”
