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.
It’s pretty clear that the only thing preventing senate Republicans from making their revulsion of Trump public is their well-founded fear that, via severe reprisals by the former president, they’ll lose their seats.
These people may be (OK, are) scum, but they would love to be in a position in which they could admit to their constituencies that Trump a) is a garden variety criminal, b) is terrible for the common American, and c) makes a mockery of the United States on the world stage.
Hell, even Ron DeSantis, whom Trump loved to bully by peppering him with unkind nicknames, endorsed Trump after withdrawing his candidacy. It’s hard to imagine anything more cowardly.
Here’s a short video worth checking out. The speaker notes that there is a universal phenomenon that occurs to people who leave the Earth and have the opportunity to see our home from space.
To a person, they report wondering how it’s possible that people treat one another with such hatred and violence, when we’re all going to live and die on a tiny speck of rock, floating through space.
One thing to notice about protest marches is the number of participants over 60 years old.
It’s impolite to get too precise in estimating a woman’s age, but let’s just say the one carrying the sign at left has been out of school for at least a few years.
Great to see people of all ages standing up for their beliefs, even those who understand that the changes they’re demanding are very unlikely to happen in their lifetimes.
I’m not a lawyer, but it’s hard for me to imagine any circumstances in which a criminal defendant’s understanding of the legal nature of the crimes he’s alleged to have committed has any bearing on his guilt or innocence.
If I rob a bank, go to trial, and claim “I’ve done nothing wrong,” I would expect the justice system to be completely indifferent to that statement.
If you want to subscribe to the “This Week in Science” podcast, as I do, the link is above. The graphic here is from this week’s show.
I remain hopeful that an entry in the near future will read: “Scientists develop advanced nuclear, via both fusion of hydrogen and fission of thorium, to the point that it is now commercially available. Fossil fuels to be gone in a few years max.”
From former U.S. Representative Beto O’Rourke:
