Category: Uncategorized

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:

Astrology Rising

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.

“American Carnage” – White Supremacist Style

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.

Continue reading “Teleprompted Trump: Who’s He Kidding?”

When coincidences point to causation

(Actually, I lied about three guesses. It’s only one guess—mine—but I put its likelihood as better than 75%. Bear with me.)

On Sunday President Trump was, via Twitter, threatening IN ALL CAPS to rain down death and destruction on Iran because of . . . Iranian government rhetoric.  The rhetoric was Iranian President Hassan Rouhani warning that war with his country would be “the mother of all wars.” (Rouhani has to talk tough because the clergy who really rule the country require it. I’m not sure they were entirely happy with the echo of Saddam Hussein saying that war between the U.S. and his country would be “the mother of all battles”—we all know how that turned out—but I wonder if Rouhani was chuckling inside.) Rouhani went on to fulminate, “Don’t play with fire, or you will regret [it]. Iranian people are master and they will never bow to anyone.”

WORDS.  Words which are, in belligerence of tone, pretty much standard fare in Iranian bluster since the clergy toppled the U.S.-friendly Shah of Iran in 1979. And for those words, Rouhani got back the now notorious all-caps tweet from Trump: ‘NEVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER [blah blah blah to the effect that we’d squash Iran like a bug—mirroring the kind of rhetoric Rouhani used, only in the case of Trump, unlike Rouhani, it sounded as if the President was off on one of his temper tantrums, personally aggrieved by someone seeming to stand up to him].

On Tuesday, we hear a suddenly agreeable Trump saying his administration stands ready to come to the negotiating table. With Iran, that is. Followed by “shraararrasshreeshshshseesh” which was the sound of John Bolton tearing his hair out.

Continue reading “Three Guesses as to why President Trump Softened on Iran”

Give me liberty, or give me strangling regulation!

The self-contradictions in economic libertarianism are acknowledged even by libertarians.  Ron Paul himself has accepted that some constraints on pollution are necessary, to prevent polluters in one geographical area from inflicting harm on people in other geographical areas—acid rain, where smokestack emissions in one place inflict damage downwind, being a simple case in point.  Water pollution operates under a similar principle. Unregulated, uncontained pollution represents an “externalized cost”—there’s a cost paid not by the polluter but by the victims.  In general the victims—people, plants, animals—are indirectly injured, and each individual only by a tiny amount at any one time in any one place.  The damage is cumulative—little noticed in the moment, but with large consequences over long spans of time.

You’d think that externalized costs of many kinds would present difficulties in principle for most libertarians—coal plants release mercury into the atmosphere, causing damage to health outside the coal plant, for which coal plants should be held responsible.*  It’s part of libertarianism that everyone should be free to do what they want, as long as it doesn’t hurt others. Ergo, to be consistent, individuals (to include  corporations, whom the Supreme Court has deemed to have the rights of individual citizens), should be no freer to spew toxic contaminants at the public, than to rob them at gunpoint.

Continue reading “Freedom from Regulation: No Foul Lines”

Trump out of excuses for toxic behavior

Yesterday we heard the official White House doctor reports President Trump to be in good health (due to “good genes” rather than healthy behavior) and scored perfectly on a cognitive test.

You may ask what sort of pressure was put on the doctor to give Trump a much better than passing grade. But, if we can take the good doctor at his word—keeping in mind whom he’s working for—it means that there are no excuses left for what the President says and does.

Continue reading “Doctor Confirms Trump is a Monster”

It’s a rising tide.  Momentum from the women of 2017 carries right into 2018.

Oprah Winfrey’s rousing speech at the Golden Globes fueled hopes that the #MeToo movement will be more than just backlash against exploitation and abuse by men.   It was also a  call for women not just to step up, but to move forward.  It was a call to arms.

And two days later,  Diane Feinstein took the fight to the entrenched leadership of the Republican Party, by releasing the transcript of testimony from a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, in defiance of Committee Chair Charles Grassley. That was the testimony by Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS on investigations into Trump’s twisted history, that was conducted during the 2016 election.

The transcript of Simpson’s testimony itself—not classified, but kept under wraps by Grassley and his henchmen—revealed just what malicious games Grassley and his allies in deceit such as Lindsey Graham, have been practicing, in their attempt to undermine the investigation of Russian interference with the 2016 election.*

Continue reading “Women Kick Butt to Kick Off 2018”

George Will gets one thing right

In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post (link below), the conservative intellectual George Will engaged in one of  his favorite tasks of bashing other intellectuals for their dire predictions  of doom, using one of his favorite sages, Eric Hoffer.

There’s some truth in his point about doom-saying intellectuals, although on the tax bill issue he’s off the mark—he’s overlooking the long-term effects of the new tax bill.  Not that George Will is myopic; instead he skips the subject because slashing the corporate tax is an item of conservative faith.  He might think the cut was too big, but in principle it’s a move in the right direction. So he won’t talk about its defects.

The  “attention economy” and undermining of human will

It’s at the end of this opinion piece that George Will (not “human will”) puts his finger on something that’s really troubling: the internet heating public discourse to the boiling point,  especially in social media.

Continue reading “More on “The Other Addiction””

“Just Get over It” is (usually) shallow and mean-spirited

Oh dear, sorry for this but I am once again sucked into political commentary, provoked by other persons’ commentary.  Here I was hoping to concentrate on the soothing cerebral task, the Most Amazing Year in Space Ever, but my mid-brain took over thanks to following a link on The Daily Kos.  It’s not my fault, but here goes anyway:

In the context of taking to task Budget Director Mick Mulvaney’s sickeningly callous statements about government-funded food assistance programs (here ) brought to us by Kos Media, a number of folks commenting engaged in an argument over Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss  in 2016.

Once again we heard some voices on the left telling those of us who deplored past attacks on Clinton from within her own party that we should  “just get over it.”

Continue reading “Let’s NOT Get over It: Always Learn from History”

Parade of know-nothing judicial nominees marches on

Of recent Trump judicial nominees: two were yanked by the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, conservative Charles Grassley, for lack of competence. A third (Matthew Petersen) withdrew after being grilled on basic points of the the law by Republican senator John Kennedy, during which the senator’s consternation over Petersen’s hedging and failure to answer was ill-disguised.

News organization such as the Washington Post bring to light the most flagrant cases of  incompetence on the part of Trump nominees who are seeking lifetime judicial posts, but we can safely infer that many of those being confirmed, without our hearing of it, are likely to have only marginal  credentials. They get confirmed because they are conservatives, and the committee is in a hurry to cram them in—so much of a hurry that committee Democrats are largely frozen out of the loop (as with the tax bill, although these judgeships may be more consequential in the long run; the tax bill can be undone by future legislation, but these federal judges’ positions are for life—ironically, that provision was meant to insulate the judges from politics, but these nominees are coming in with plenty of conservative political baggage from the get-go).

Continue reading “Ignorance as Policy: Rare Consistency in the Trump Administration”

Awareness of Climate Change and coal’s contribution penetrates coal country, makes a few converts

When you don’t have much to lose, truths will out . . .