A reader asked for my position on his question at left.

Of course.  And often, it’s not just “in my head”; I shout it aloud.

On CNN just now: “Someone with whom they’re speaking to,” should have been, “Someone to whom they’re speaking.”

Other things that get my attention on a routine basis:

Disagreement between subject and verb, e.g., “There’s so many changes in our tastes in music.”

Disregarding the subjunctive mood, e.g., “If I was president, I’d …”

Sure, there are newscasters who make second- or third-grade-level grammatical mistakes, like “Those off-course bombs could have went anywhere.”  But these truly horrific errors are rare, as (I suspect) producers of these shows immediately ban the offenders from the airwaves.

 

 

 

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I often say, “It hasn’t been a good last hundred years-or-so for philosophy.”  And as shown at left, this sentiment is shared by minds far brighter than my own, in this case, German-British physicist and mathematician Max Born.

Until fairly recently, if you wanted to learn what humankind knew about:

The ultimate building blocks of the universe, you asked a metaphysician, especially one focused on ontology, the study of being.  Now you ask a particle physicist.

The origins of the universe, you asked a theologian.  Now you ask an astrophysicist.

The limits of human knowledge, you asked an epistemologist.  Now you ask a neurologist, or perhaps an extremely specialized psychologist.

I don’t regret have reading Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and the like, but the relevance of these folks’ thoughts on the summits of human knowledge has taken a significant tumble since they were in their heyday.

 

 

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If Republicans take control of the U.S. government and implement Project 2025, one of the casualties will be FEMA.  Americans affected by natural disasters like hurricanes will be on their own to repair their damaged property, and many of those who are underinsured will join the rest of the homeless population.

Are government programs that help the common American actually “socialism?” It depends on whom you ask.

 

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Russia wants Ukraine back.  (And I’m sure, England wants the 13 colonies back.)

Neither is going to happen, but that doesn’t prevent the Republican party from backing Putin and standing against the free world.

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The ad here reads: “Jeremy’s Razors isn’t for liberal white women. It’s for men. Conservative men.”

I would change “conservative men” to “extremely stupid, gullible, easily manipulated men.”

Seriously, I’m a marketing guy too, and I understand the need to position my client’s product according to the unmet needs of the target market.  I just find it hard to believe that, unless the average member of that target market has the IQ of a head of lettuce, he’s actually looking for a razor that has some sort of ultra-right-wing political standing.

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From the article: The D.C. Court of Appeals agreed with a disciplinary committee that found Giuliani’s challenges to the 2020 election results “utterly false” and “recklessly so.”

Now an interesting question arises.  Suppose you’re a Fox News viewer and you’ve been convinced that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.  Do you now believe that the entire justice system, along with the District of Columbia Bar Association, is corrupt?

Or maybe it’s time to give up on the most obvious of the lies, and turn your attention to something real.  Perhaps Kamala Harris is a Marxist and an asset of the Chinese Communist Party.

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Over the past couple of months, we’ve seen hundreds of top Republicans come forward and say essentially what Mesa, Arizona mayor John Giles said here: it would be a huge mistake to re-elect Donald Trump, given his moral failings and mental health issues.

The question, of course, is what this means to the MAGA base.  Mesa is the third most populous city in the state, and its people are generally well educated, thus it’s going to go for Harris anyway.  But suppose you live in a rural part of the state and the nearest college graduate is 50 miles away.  Are you going to change your position based on what some sissified city liberal says?

 

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I actually didn’t need another good reason to stay out of Chick-Fil-A, but it looks like I got one nonetheless.

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One of the many casualties of Project 2025 will be NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its subsidiary, the National Hurricane Center.  The motive for dismantling NOAA?  It’s “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

However, as one might suspect, all this comes at a huge cost.  There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million people who live in hurricane-prone areas of the southeastern part of the United States whose property–and very lives–are endangered by these storms each year.   Project 2025 will shut them off from the information that could keep them safe.

What we’re seeing here is quite typical of Trump: a reckless disregard for Americans’ well-being and a disdain for science itself.

 

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Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen probably wrote the content of the meme here as it applies to the Russian people under Putin.

Americans need to hope that it has no real applicability to their lives here in the United States.

In truth, this could go in either direction.

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