Though the meme may sound like good news for those of us who prefer democracy to authoritarianism, keep in mind that Trump supporters don’t seem to have the same concern about incoherent bullcrap as the rest of us.
If Trump’s lies and insane rants haven’t bothered his base yet, that’s unlikely to change in the future, regardless of what comes out of his mouth.
I agree with the content of the meme here, but what makes it worth mentioning is how bizarre all this is. The Republicans have backed themselves into a corner, armed only with lies, hate, abortion bans, criminality, while offering nothing of value to voters other than white nationalism and acting as a wrecking ball against any and all progress.
I don’t like anything about these people, but, as an American, I’m actually hoping to see behavior that’s a little closer to truth, sanity, and justice.
It’s not the United States I grew up in, where pretty-much everybody had reason to be proud of his country.
It looks like Reagan appointee Judge Royce Lamberth is pushing back on our “post-truth” world.
Apparently, he’s old-school, from a time when facts mattered and we didn’t have entire “news” networks spreading utter hogs***.
As readers may have noticed, I like to post cartoons that provide insight into Trump’s popularity.
Sadly, I don’t know whom to accredit for this gem.
In a recent post, China Lies at the Crux of the Effort to Mitigate Climate Change, I mentioned the primary impediment to our efforts to mitigate climate change, i.e., that our political and economic world is divided into 200+ sovereign nations, each of which is essentially on its own to prioritize, fund, and implement what strategies it sees fit–if any.
Until I came across the quote here from the late Carl Sagan, I was unaware that he shared this viewpoint.
Aristotle brings up a most interesting point here.
A college friend of mine used to go off alone into the mountains for weeks at a time during vacations, which fulfilled him greatly.
I tried it once shortly after we graduated, for a few days, rather than weeks. Like my buddy, I took a few books and a bit of weed. I wasn’t miserable, but it wasn’t an experience that I wish to repeat.
Apparently, I’m neither a “wild beast” nor “a god.” Something, perhaps, I should have known going in.
The quote here comes from Galileo Galilei.
I envy his capacity to suspend judgment; I have to admit that I don’t possess it myself.
Maybe it’s this level of open-mindedness that enabled him to set aside what everyone thought they knew about the cosmos 500 years ago, opening the door to true progress in astronomy and physics more generally.
Re: the graphic here, a reader notes: Honestly, I don’t know how anyone employed by Fox News sleeps at night. They have done more to divide and hurt this country than any other entity in the past 30 years.
While Fox News is, indeed, a bastardly organization, my understanding is that it has abandoned the Big Lie; it was forced to because of the $787 million defamation judgment following the lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems.
In any case, it’s clear that the momentum is turning against Trump. His cult following is dwindling, as more people figure out that he’s simply a sociopathic conman.
After a few months of watching Trump getting raked over the coals in his criminal trials, all this will become even more obvious.
Here’s an interesting article that begins:
Gone are the days of the unyielding God-fearing mother as the archetype of good parenting, suggests a recent article from the Los Angeles Times. According to multiple reports, research has shown that a secular upbringing may be healthier for children. According to a 2010 Duke University study, kids raised this way display less susceptibility to racism and peer pressure, and are “less vengeful, less nationalistic, less militaristic, less authoritarian, and more tolerant, on average, than religious adults.” But the list of benefits doesn’t stop there.
Insofar as my wife and I are non-religious, we thought it was simply wrong to impose the notion of an omniscient, omnipotent, and potentially vengeful God on our kids, if only because doing so would be hypocritical in the extreme.
Children face an entire array of challenges as they try to make sense of the world around them; they don’t need a whole new layer of complication, contradiction, and the rejection of science.
We knew our kids would be exposed to religion at some point early in their lives–from their cousins, friends, and so forth–and they would be able to make their own choices in this regard.
Moreover, I reasoned that if they want to know what my wife and I believe on the subject, they can ask.
Here’s a great article in The Economist that covers what China is (and isn’t) doing to put an end to the world’s consumption of coal, by far the most toxic source of energy.
From the piece: China has good reason to prioritise the climate. Some of its biggest cities, including Shanghai, lie on the coast and could be swallowed by rising seas. The arid north lacks drinking water. And extreme weather is already taking a toll. Last year deaths associated with heatwaves in China increased by 343% compared with the historical average, according to a study published by the Lancet, a medical journal. This summer floods damaged much of China’s wheat crop.
This calls to mind the reason we have this problem in the first place: money, and the fact that each of the world’s 200+ sovereign nations is essentially on its own to prioritize, fund, and implement its own climate change mitigation strategies.
