The Republican Drive To Destroy The Environment

Trump plans to run the EPA by executive order. The most ignorant man to ever occupy the White House will now dictate environmental policy.

From Reuters

Republicans have begun their effort to gut the Endangered Species Act which saved the Bald Eagle and the Timber Wolf

Reported by The Week

A bill has been proposed to eliminate the EPA altogether

Reported by CNBC

In early January Jason Chaffetz offered a bill to sell millions of acres of federal land. It was later withdrawn.

From the LATimes

The bright siders say the extremely anti-environmental aggressiveness of the Trump administration and the Republican Congress may galvanize environmentalists.

But why do we need to refight wars? Is it a good thing to redirect energies to saving what was saved already and telling people what everybody has known for the past 20 years?

The world has known about the dangers of climate change for longer than that actually and instead of reaching consensus on it we lost consensus.

Because fossil fuels were simply too profitable and its corporations were too greedy and the politicians they owned were too needy.

GOP Climate Apocalypse

Scientific American reports on the urgent warnings our military leaders are sending about the dangers of climate change. The Republicans only listen to the military when they–the Republicans–want a war. When the military wants to avoid dangers they aren’t interested.

The story in Scientific American

The Guardian reports that Trump’s junta plans to cut out Nasa’s climate, oceanographic and atmospheric scientists. Listening to who instead? Soothsayers? The oddsmakers at Ladbrokes? Wizards in white pointed hoods?

The story reported in The Guardian

The arctic which, as every devoted fan of Christmas knows, is traditionally freezing cold this time of year, this year has chosen to be alarmingly warm. The 60s animated specials about Rudolph and Santa were not scientific predictions of an ideal future. When the arctic melts entirely, the oceans rise, the permafrost thaws releasing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere as well as long-frozen diseases and anthrax spores, the ocean currents change––whole crop regions rely on the reliable circulation of ocean currents and rainfall, not something we should mess with. Melted ice caps will tend to change the salt content of the oceans, possibly endangering the vast and complex ocean flora that produces the oxygen all human life depends on to live. Climate deniers are endangering all of us. For what? To prolong the fossil fuel profits of the companies that pay them.

The story reported by PBS's NOVA

Reported at SLATE

The Republicans in Congress are also completely hypnotized by the climate change denial industry and the fossil fuel companies that send them money. Endangering our country for money. When do we call that bribery and treason? The latest insanity: Congress obediently tweets misleading bogus news stories also produced by the fossil fuel PR machinery.

Reported by NBC News

From Bloomberg, a very useful debunker of all those climate change deniers who say human industry has nothing to do with it. A set of clear graphs says otherwise.

ThinkProgress: Trump talks climate policy with the NYTimes and they obediently repeat what he says as gospel. Unwise.

National Geographic reports on the link between climate change and extreme weather. No, Oklahoma, it isn’t just God’s will...

Fortune Magazine (that pinko communist rag) reports that solar and renewable jobs are outpacing fossil fuel jobs. (Until Trump jerks us back toward disaster.)

Steve Bannon, former Goldman Sachs banker, was also deeply involved in the highly publicized Biosphere experiment in Arizona. He was the guy who took the serious experiment and rigged it to suit his own preconceptions. But, to paraphrase an old saying “You can’t bribe Mother Nature."

Reported by Motherboard

I watch as the Republicans lead this dangerous lurch toward climate disaster and wonder how many of them are rubbing their hands with glee, imagining the imminent end of civilization that will cause Jesus to return. It might be a good time to ask them publicly if this is what they are aiming for. Are they hoping and actively working to cause global collapse and bring on the apocalypse? I thought Jesus told us to be good stewards of this earth. Some very bad, very irresponsible, very dangerous stewards are now in control of things.

Donald Trump Is Filling the Swamp With Alligators

Trump won millions of votes by promising to drain the swamp in Washington.

But Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston describes how Trump is not draining the swamp as promised but is enlarging it and filling it with larger alligators.

From the Daily Beast

Trump’s new Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin, foreclosed on a 90 year-old woman’s home because she made a 27¢ error on her payment.

Reported by Politico

Mnuchin’s bank milked the last financial crisis for profit, reported in The Nation.

Science is in the hands of zealots who seek to corrupt it.

The Guardian reports that Trump and the Republican Congress are already finalizing plans to end climate research.

The Justice Department has been entrusted to a career bigot. NPR reports on Jeff Sessions' career spent ignoring racial injustice. "The KKK is OK, except for the pot smokers."

The Dept of Health and Human Services will be led by someone who pushes junk science and ideologies.

Reported at ScienceBlogs

The New Yorker's financial reporter John Cassidy explains how the Republicans' repeal of Obamacare will hit working people and poor people the hardest. Kicking Down while Kissing Up.

National Security advice will be coming from a fan of conspiracy theories who is eager for another world war.

Reported by the Washington Post

The environment will be in the hands of someone who has spent recent decades blowing smoke for the fossil fuel industry, turning scientific consensus on its head and pushing ideologically driven b.s and corporate non-science.

The fossil fuels/climate-change-denying career of Myron Ebell reported by the Washington Post

Myron Ebell's dangerous career reported in Scientific American

(In case you believe Climate Change worries are confined to the left wing fringes, the US Military has been sending urgent warnings about the dangers, as reported by The Guardian. Among the feared results will be massive surges in refugees. What is happening to Europe would begin happening here.)

It now appears, after haranguing Hillary Clinton for using unauthorized email (without any security breaches), Trump may appoint a man convicted of breaching security as his Sec of State. The Hill (Congress’s newspaper) reports that Petraeus will need to inform his probation officer before he accepts the position. An interesting start to what promises to be a corrupt administration.

The Triumph of Make Believe

“Lying” is such an ugly word. We are told not to say “The Republicans won by lying.” Even if it’s true (and fact checkers say it is) it’s so unpleasant.

Let’s say it another way. Republicans are very good at Magical Thinking. (Prime example: Trickle Down Economics) They won by Pretending. They have ushered in a new era of Make Believe.

The first bit of Let’s Pretend that turned this election cycle was when Chief Justice John Roberts announced that racism and prejudice was over and done with in the South where it had been so bad that (at least in some history books) white people owned black people as slaves. After slavery went away white Southerners spent another hundred years keeping their black brothers and sisters down by not letting them vote or sit at soda fountains or work at various jobs or walk on a sidewalk a white woman might want to use. An ugly time… if you believe those darn history books. But that was over and done, said John Roberts. So it was with joy and pride that he announced the Voting Rights Act no longer needed to be upheld in the South. No more protection of black and minority voters was necessary. Hurrah! He said it with such a convincing smile a lot of people applauded.

The response was immediate. Republicans quickly and gleefully reinstated exactly the kind of voter suppression laws that the Voting Rights Act’s supervision had prevented. Some even boasted about the achievement. Job done. The Chief Justice is very good at Make Believe and didn’t even notice the mockery of what he had said. Maybe someone close to him saw him wink.

PBS/Frontline reported the rapid surge in voter suppression that followed this Supreme Court ruling. As did ProPublica and McClatchy news service. The fair and reliable framework for our democracy was sent back into the kind of corruptions that existed during Jim Crow.

This voter suppression is not confined to the South, though it’s history is more outrageous there. Northern states Republicans have been emboldened by the Supreme Court to propose cynical, racist and antidemocratic laws in many states. They’re on the books in some key swing states. One of their tricks is to demand all voters purchase a special photo ID and then to make it hard to obtain them, placing the ID centers far from historically black or Democratic areas. A conservative judge skilled at Make Believe can pretend that none of this has anything to do with bigotry or Republican bias and the laws remain. In Wisconsin it’s estimated that 300,000 voters were barred from voting by not being able to produce the magic ID or having their ID challenged. Trump won Wisconsin by 27,000 votes adding to his Electoral College total.

This was reported by a Wisconsin NBC affiliate.

Did this make the difference? Several reliable sources say No, it was not the deciding factor. (VOX, who I cite very often is one of these.) That the suppressed voter was less likely to vote anyway. I point out that the surge among the rural Republican voters was also unlikely. Who would have expected devout rural people and respectable suburbanites to vote for a man who boasts of groping women, who mocks the handicapped, who encourages mob violence, a man who faces charges this month of defrauding thousands of ordinary people like themselves? It required magical thinking.

I suspect that a clear public rejection of one candidate’s lies and bigotry would help suppress his turnout even among people who believed the lies and the bigotry. That did not happen this year. For most of the year mass media broadcast hours and hours of Donald Trump’s outright lies… excuse me, Make Believe… and his downright bigotry without comment or criticism. While they were giving free air time to this ugly demagogue they were aggressively reporting the endless investigation of unsubstantiated charges against his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Those two factors gave Trump a major updraft and Hillary a major downdraft. It was not enough to explain what happened but it contributed to it, it gave it a boost.

We look to our news media for truth. When they promote Make Believe and give lengthy air time to bogus accusations they make us doubt what is real. They make us more receptive to Magical Thinking and Make Believe. (And Lies.)

Donald Trump’s entire career has been flim-flam. When he had catastrophic setbacks in real estate he turned to what’s called Reality TV. Reality TV is not reality at all. It is Make Believe. But it’s label is persuasive. The networks broadcasting it knows it is a total fabrication, a lie, but it is good for ratings and good for profits. If you promote falsehood as truth, truth is degraded and falsehood becomes part of conventional thinking. Here I could go into the teachings of Joseph Goebbels on this topic, the uses and execution of the Big Lie, but conventional thinking has barred that from any modern day discussion. Supposedly because Trump voters are not wearing brown shirts while attacking Jews and immigrants and people of color they are not the same as Hitler’s mob. Hitler is He Who Must Not Be Named. We mustn’t speak of these things. They are history and nobody cares about history anymore. Pretend those things didn’t happen. It makes it easier to pretend they won’t happen again.

But let’s get back to Make Believe.

Let’s pretend for a minute that Donald Trump is a Man of the People. That has been the media narrative, and you know how authentic that is. His followers have spent the past year believing this myth. The Man of the People is a man who lives in marble halls with gilt furniture and large oil paintings of himself in gilt frames. (Hillary’s credibility has been endlessly attacked because she sides with working class interests from an expensive home in Westchester. Trump doesn’t pretend to embrace the laboring classes at all. (He’s famously phobic about touching regular people unless they are sufficiently young, female and “hot”.) He does not embrace their interests. He only embraces their resentments and hatreds. He is an America First hero who builds his exclusive towers with imported steel and imports his flash neckties and Trump label suits from Mexico. He refuses to pay the builders and tradesmen he hires to do work on his properties. He is bogus from his ludicrous hair to the manicured fingernails on his tiny hands. He has contempt for the working classes and their mundane unglamorous lives. But he does voice their anger. He has replanted the idea that outright bigotry is OK and All American, a sad notion that many in the working classes are receptive to. The bogus reality star has legitimized our ugliest tendencies and television has turned him into a hero. We spent a century and a half since Lincoln slowly repudiating this lie of white superiority and in one election year Trump has relegitimized it, with the eager collaboration of popular media. It’s ironic that such an inferior specimen is now the show pony of white supremacy. He isn’t even white, he’s orange.

So Donald Trump is a make believe business success, a make believe Man of the People. The picture we have of him is a television fairy tale. He is a creature of the media he pretends to despise. But we are here. The package has arrived. We have opened it. No returns allowed. Does it belong to us, or do we belong to it?

I won’t spend a lot of time sorting out the empty promises he’s made. He’s already walked back some of them. The wall he promised to build was another piece of make believe. The swamp of lobbyist influence he promised to drain he is now stocking with more lobbyists, ones who owed their new status to him. He only pretended to want to end the influence of the big bankers. They are now in his posse.

The most dangerous promise he made remains. He said he’d end all efforts to combat Climate Change, because he says Climate Change is a Chinese hoax, and his transition and cabinet have a strong odor of oil and coal, not mine workers or oil field workers but lobbyists and PR geniuses. The authors of Big Oil’s successful campaign to discredit the science are all for Trump because they know his millions of devotees will believe whatever they say. We have come to a dangerous point in our history when the most powerful person in our nation is a con man, facing significant indictment this month for a massive fraud related to his bogus Trump University scheme, and the scientists, the people we trust to find out the essential truths about our world, are accused of fraud. And the news media collaborated with this inversion by giving his falsehoods equal credence and equal time. The fact checking sites found her statements mostly honest (are any of us completely honest?) and Trump’s mostly false, and mostly very very false. He thinks science is bunk. Millions of his followers who presumably passed their science classes in schools have now endorsed this dangerous idea. They cannot pretend they haven’t. So millions of others who didn’t really know or don’t fully understand are now convinced that science is something we vote on. That it isn’t true if we decide to not believe it.

Science doesn’t care whether we believe in it. It will happen whether we believe it or not.

We may think we are hostages to Trump now. But Trump has made us hostages to the horrible scientific consequences that are now going to unfold. We could have wished Trump away by voting more emphatically against him, by not trusting the cozy belief that Americans would reject something like this without every single person voting against it. But we cannot keep climate change from unfolding unless we enact and keep in place key policies which Trump has promised to oppose and reverse. This is an insane kind of make believe. Like a person who steps out of a 15 story window believing he can fly, or that angels will rescue him.

As delusions go this is not as much of an outlier as you might think. There are millions of devout right wing Christians who honestly believe that if we screw up this planet badly enough that Jesus will come. They long for this to happen.

This was reported recently in The Atlantic.

We pass these people on the street and they seem like other people we know, until they begin to discuss their beliefs. Stepping politely away from them is the safest social response but it is not going to keep us safe from the final ascension of their kind to power. Donald Trump is not a churchgoing religious zealot but his Vice President is. Mike Pence is an intense believer in Christian fairy tales and magical thinking. He not only believes the proven climate science is a hoax, he believes that the whole science of evolution from Darwin to the present day is a hoax and a lie. (In terms of ethics and morals, the New Testament is a very useful and humane document, but the superChristians evade the humane elements and prefer the more dubiously interpreted bits, the ones that provoked holy wars and inquisitions down through the Christian era. The Biblical fragments that seem to endorse slavery and oppression of women seem particularly popular among superChristians.) Mike Pence firmly believes the earth is exactly as old as the Bible says it is and that everything that is in the Bible happened exactly as written. He does not like to go into the hundreds of huge contradictions in the Bible any more than he likes to address Trump’s own almost daily contradictions because he is a Man of Faith. To him science is myth and the Bible is fact. If scientific evidence is worth anything at all today he is evidence that we have returned to the Middle Ages, before the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, before Galileo and Newton and Darwin and Einstein and Crick. The Nazis burned thousands of books in their era. In our era we don’t need to burn them because the vast majority of people aren’t aware that books exist, except the one they clutch on Sunday. They have made us a near twin of the Sharia Law extremist Islam they profess to despise. Anti-modern, anti-toleration, out of the reach of questions and proofs.

Kids used to play a particular game of Make Believe. “Let’s pretend Diane doesn’t exist,” they’d say, and Diane would find people she knew walking past her in the school hallway and not hearing the things she said. It was a fun game and very popular. Kids were very good at it in junior high and then outgrew it. Gay teenagers experienced this in an earlier time, as did teenagers of color. Each new wave of immigrants experienced this, Italians, Swedes, Irish, eastern Europeans included. They were treated like they didn’t exist. Pretending something doesn’t exist doesn’t make it disappear.

Recently, there was a woman in Montana interviewed by a reporter on NPR. She was opposed to the settling of Syrian and other refugees in Montana. The reporter asked her if this was racist. She replied that there couldn’t possibly be any racism in Montana because there weren’t any black people there. A GOP chairwoman in Ohio said to a reporter that there was no racism in this country until Obama became president. For millions of Americans this is absolutely true, because they believe it is true. If they never saw any other races they didn’t despise them. It was those other races coming within their range of vision that caused the racism, impinging on their lives, breathing white people’s air, walking on white people’s sidewalks and demanding to eat at their lunch counters. This uppityness is what caused racism. It wasn’t their fault. Racism was not their problem, it was the problem of the other races. The problem with this is that those other races are a majority of people on this earth and white people are a diminishing minority. This magical thinking about race is a dangerous self-deception but it is now the norm because the Trump presidency has validated it. It is very difficult to change people’s beliefs.

Mike Pence believes no one is born gay, despite the clear science on this. Mike Pence says science is bunk and his beliefs are true and he is the Vice President elect, and his frank, polite Indiana way of looking at you convinces you that he has no interest in hearing otherwise. He is firm in his bigotry. If Trump has as short an attention span as he has demonstrated up to now Mike Pence will be the acting president the way Dick Cheney was for eight years. And we know how well that went. At least Dick Cheney was able to understand the difference between science and fairy tales but he exploited this vulnerability in others. We are now led by a fake with no center and a true believer in magical thinking.

Was it our own magical thinking that allowed it to happen? At crucial moments in history the worst possible reaction is to doubt the science and the truth. The failure of the polling experts to predict the late Trump surge has undermined our trust in all experts. How did they fail to see this? They failed to see this outcome because they underestimated the likelihood that America might fall for nonsense this evident and this dangerous. They trusted us. In fact more Americans voted for science and honesty and trustworthiness than voted for fraud and deception and fairy tales. The fact that a lot of Americans were uncertain might be explained by the news media’s dangerous habit of always presenting both sides as equally true. As if it’s biased to say truth is more honest than falsehood or safety is no better than clear danger and enormous corruption is no worse than petty indiscretion. The American public was poorly served. We were delivered to this place. Magical thinkers believe we can shape things to suit our private fantasies, but the universe doesn't care about our private fantasies. We may soon reach a point where mankind cannot walk back the harm we have done. The scientists do not deal in fairy tales, and they have warned us. Covering our ears and chanting USA! USA! or Trump! Trump! Trump! will not keep the oceans from flooding our ports and shorelines. Prayer will not keep the crop growing regions we depend on for food from drying up or washing away or civilization from collapsing around us. If you believe in the teachings of the Bible, heed the part where we are instructed to be good stewards of this creation, to choose truth over lies, to oppose bullies and aid the poor in their struggles rather than falling in with the rich. Over thousands of years our wisest teachers have taught us what to do, how to make wise humane choices, and we seem poised to do the opposite.

The End Of Science May Signal The End of Civilization––and Trump's In Favor Of It

Millions of trees suddenly dying. Storms of unprecedented violence. Once in a millennium floods occurring once a month. This sort of thing ought to mobilize world leaders to action.

This scary die off of forests was reported this morning in The Guardian.

There have been many articles recently about ocean levels already rising. Scientists predicted this and many Americans chose to demonize them.

Rising ocean levels reported by National Geographic.

Rising oceans is not as worrying as rising ocean acidity, which may compound the climate change dynamic and also degrade the earth’s ability to create oxygen. Think about that.

Rising acidity of the oceans reported by Scientific American.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party is in control of Congress and on the verge of winning the White House. The Republican leadership has accepted millions of dollars in exchange for denying climate change and blocking scientific research into climate change. They think that believing something isn’t happening will prevent it from happening. So they close their eyes and wish and pray and they punish and condemn anyone who is paying attention. Being rational and responsible is a punishable offense, according to the Republican Party.

The ignorant and dangerous anti-science leadership in this Republican Congress, reported in the New Yorker.

Half of our country is in thrall to a delusion. The right half of the country believes if they vote for Donald Trump all the things he denies are true will automatically be untrue. One man’s mental illness has become contagious and it may become the law of the land. Bigotry may become policy. Ugly rumor will be our guide to what is true, the uglier the truer. Superstition and corporate PR will replace science. One man’s angry impulses will replace careful and rational planning. Policies that should benefit the whole country will be retooled to suit one man, his whims (and boy has he got whims), his prejudices, his hates, his lusts, his greed, his narcissism, his frequent urges to do violent harm to people who have displeased him.

The New Yorker gives us a picture of what Trump will be able to do immediately when he reaches office.

If Trump is elected all of our nation’s decision-making institutions will pass to him. He will cancel climate change accords and devote America to full use of fossil fuels. And 99% of our scientists will be silenced if not criminalized. Let’s set aside his endorsement of more nuclear weapons in trouble spots and a looser policy about using them. Let’s forget about his expressed willingness to kill people he “has a feeling” are criminals. Let’s forget about his ugly bigotry toward all non-white people living on earth. Let’s forget about his long history of fraud and violation of contracts and reneging on promises and lies big and small. Let’s forget about his scary admiration for the worst dictators on the planet, and his many millions in debt owed to one of them.

Let’s just focus on one thing, the greatest danger to human civilization in the history of human civilization: global climate change.

It won’t stop happening just because one poorly informed individual refuses to believe it is happening. Half of America’s voters seem excited to go on this carnival ride with him, to trust his shallow beliefs, to place their lives and their loved ones’ lives in his hands. It’s like a hostage situation, where the male head of a household barricades himself and his family in his house with his arsenal, only this arsenal is nuclear. It seldom ends well. Usually it ends with the family dead and the deranged man dead by his own hand. It’s like Jonestown where many hundreds were willing to drink the poisoned kool-aid because their leader instructed them to. His beliefs were translated into orders and they obeyed.

A few years ago we laughed as a creepy and hilarious congresswoman left the political stage. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said science was evil and the End Times were here. She seemed downright pleased that the world was coming to and end. It was all falling apart according to her prayers. People like Bachmann believe that if they can screw up the world badly enough by provoking wars and poisoning the environment and making economies collapse, then Jesus will come and rescue them. Like a fire starter who believes the fire department will give them a medal. Her loopy beliefs got a lot of mileage and endorsement from FoxNews, the leading cable news channel, and from talk radio. (On talk radio 9/11 is believed to have been a plot run by the U.S. government.)

Well, folks, half of American voters, or nearly half, seem to fit this description. America’s future, and the world’s, may be in the hands of ignorant, hateful, deranged, heavily armed lunatics.

Your Daily Trump––The Anti-Science Candidate

Trump’s and the GOP’s hatred of science may doom our civilization.

Reported in Scientific American

Reported in the New Yorker

Of course many Republicans fervently and sincerely believe that if we screw this world up badly enough Jesus will come.

An excellent set of charts which show how bogus the nay-sayers' claims are

This Republican congresswoman believes if she says it it must be true.

Instead of working to limit the enormous damage of global climate change Republicans have spent billions making sure communities who will never be threatened by foreign terrorists are expensively protected from foreign terrorists. Reason? Weapons manufacturers demanded higher profits.

Reported by the National Memo

Is a journalist guilty of bias if he or she believes the honest and well-informed candidate and doesn’t give equal credence to the uninformed dishonest candidate?

A discussion (as if we needed to discuss this) of why it is wrong to give equal weight to honesty and lies

Meanwhile in a wonderful twist of karma some superchristians who’ve been saying weather disasters are God’s punishment for homosexuality have had their homes flooded by the most recent weather disaster… Most of the citizens of southern Louisiana do not deserve this, but these godbotherers might.

Reported in the Independent

Know-Nothing-ism

How did Americans become so distrustful of knowledge and education? We have been swept along in a powerful anti-expert wave for a few decades now. Maybe it dates to Reagan, who preferred folksy to informed. W raised it to an art. He beat Al Gore by being more likably stupid than that annoying smartypants.

It's pleasant to not let the hard stuff bother you, to just drift along and avoid the difficult questions. We were told not to worry our sweet heads about stuff. But it wasn't wiser heads who appropriated much of the thinking role, it was cleverer heads. Mass ignorance tends to be advocated by those who like having a jump on everyone else. Backward people are easier to manipulate and take advantage of. Who can we trust? People who want us to know what's going on. Teachers and the politicians who want better funding of education and libraries, advocates of open-government and transparency in our public sphere.

The “anti-expert” trend: “It’s entirely wrong… It’s the road back to the cave." An interesting conversation in the Guardian.

Here's another very good discussion in the New York Times about our national forgetfulness.

There is a powerful and very well-funded faction in America that seems to advocate ignorance and forgetfulness. We are urged en masse to forget history, which means forgetting the lessons of history. There are groups busily rewriting and erasing inconvenient and embarrassing parts of history, sanitizing it, making it more uniform and simpleminded and patriotic and pro-business, a history book written by the Chamber of Commerce. We are urged to doubt the multifariousness and endless debate of science. Why? Because some powerful people would prefer a blank slate, people with vacant minds that can be filled in whichever way will enable these powerful people achieve their goals. Their idea is a vast receptive and gullible public led by one unquestioned authority that keeps all the information to itself.

In this devious and subversive way the widespread carefully planted fear of elitism enables a small elite to have a monopoly on good information. In a perverse way, the very strength of expert science, its diversity and multiplicity, is used to discredit it. Science is many expert intelligences working at once. The lay public is being trained to distrust the experts. When in doubt throw up your hands and wait to be told what to do. Anti-intellectualism has created a strange kind of rebelliousness, one that likes to be obedient to simple, clear, undetailed commands. An individuality that prefers to belong to an obedient mob adhering to a uniform and unchanging set of ideas.

One odd example of this pre-enlightenment mindset sits on our Supreme Court. (The New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin writes about it here.) Clarence Thomas sees and administers justice as a set of biblical foregone conclusions. Anything that upsets his fixed ideas is evil. He is an “Originalist”, which means he believes in the absolute truth of the Founding Documents. Those documents, including his bible, the Constitution, believed that people like Clarence Thomas were barely 3/5 of a person, not really fully human, certainly not entitled to citizenship, whose proper place was as property, to be bred and worked like horses and oxen. That is a profoundly intellectualized form of deep anti-intellectualism. Foolishness masquerading as wisdom. Something Voltaire and Twain would have had a lot of fun with.

There’s the view that intellectuals have “ushered the world into a dangerous age of political nihilism.” (Of course anti-intellectuals are unfamiliar with the word nihilism.) There's an article about this in Quartz.

(There is something to this. Socratic lectures in front of large auditoriums tend to leave the ridiculous and the counter-intuitive and the counterfactual up in the air without shooting them down. Because the Socratic lecturer’s job is to leave the answers to the audience. What happens when 25%… 60%… 90% of the audience is taking the questions as answers? In a small room of students the discussion would be lively and the Socratic proposal would be thoroughly discussed, the false arguments debunked, the obvious stupidities would be shredded. This doesn’t happen in the large auditorium or in the ether where every individual stupidity has equal weight.

Which is why we have the inane standard on “news television” that both sides are always equal, whether it’s Science vs. Superstition or Science vs. ExxonMobil or “Did Hillary murder Vince Foster?”

Shawn Otto has a new book discussing the foolish American habit of devaluing science and elevating the bogus. (I think it all goes back to episodes of Mannix and Matlock and Murder, She Wrote where the killer was always the least likely person. It created a habit of disbelieving what evidence and our own logical minds tell us.)

We saw the triumph of unthinking mob mentality in the recent Brexit vote. There were plausible reasons for public anger in the UK, but it was a dangerously thoughtless decision ginned up by fear. Fear trumps reason.

(Scientific American explores the unthinking mindset behind Brexit and Trumpism.)

Unreason has created Donald Trump. The GOP has for decades cultivated a deep distaste for experts and intelligent people and evidence and science, creating a right-leaning electorate that behaves like the foul-mouthed delinquent in the back of the junior high classroom. Their candidate this year is that delinquent. (Reported in SLATE)

Trump welcomes the goofball audience of radio conspiracy theorists, the folks who hate to think but love to suspect. (The New Yorker explores the bizarre marriage of Trump and radio fruitcake Alex Jones... the man who believes the moon landing was faked and believes Obama is a Muslim terrorist from Kenya.)

In the nineteenth century there was an anti-immigrant party called The Know-Nothing Party. Today’s Republicans embrace the same kind of stubborn ignorance. If they dislike something or find something inconvenient or disagreeable it either doesn’t exist or it’s simply wrong from the get-go, no evidence necessary. They think with their abdomen, like George W. Bush did. Often as not their conclusions are fed to them via the radio or FoxNews. And those sources of “information” are informed by commercial interest groups, the corrupt end of the finance industry or Big Pharma or the private prison industry or the gun industry or the fossil fuel giants. If there is some great public need we have to address those corporate interests worry that it might finally roll back three decades of lower corporate taxes. If some pressing public issue or problem is going to cost them money they get busy persuading the public that the problem doesn’t exist. If a problem doesn’t exist it doesn’t need to be solved. (The people who say poverty is a myth, reported at Bill Moyers' website.)

We have a modern habit of disputing expertise, disputing best practices, disputing evidence (not just items of evidence but the weight of evidence), disputing the consensus. This has led to a habit of disruption. (Reported in WIRED.) Worshipping and admiring and rewarding the vandals and the anarchists. Business schools teach disruption as a positive good. It is good to question things; that’s the scientific method. But what happens when we begin to disrupt the scientific process? What happens when we attack the structures upon which our society and our systems are built? What happens when that is combined with the degradation from decades of cheapskatism which has left our systems and infrastructures unrepaired and behind in the routine upgrades?

What happens when disruption is combined with active attrition? Republican cheapskatism has left our public systems unrepaired and dangerously behind the innovation curve.

Take our election system: Republicans have attacked it on multiple fronts. They broadcast endlessly about voter fraud that doesn’t exist, and this undermines public confidence, which justifies various other attacks on the system they despise and pretend to protect and enforce. They have made it more difficult to vote. They also have large corporate allies who design and operate the voting and vote tallying systems. It’s as if they want a broken system. Partly this may be motivated by the companies that profit from “fixing” and replacing these systems, but the replacements are in fact more suspect and opaque than what they are replacing. There is a philosophy on one side that warns of chaos and fraud and suspicion and sinister invisible conspiracies while promoting these things.

Lord God Please Deliver Us From The SuperChristians

If you read the papers you’re likely to learn about all kinds of strange outliers and unusual happenings. Amidst what we know for sure is an unending War being waged upon Christianity there will be occasional stories about how Christianity is waging holy war on people who’d rather be left alone.

Slate reports on one such case in Louisiana.

And there's also this story from RawStory.

Some helpful perspective from blogger Zack Hunt.

Here is a little known fact (or maybe a carefully ignored one): Showboat religion actually runs counter to what the Gospels teach. Jesus said pretty clearly that praying loudly in public was wrong besides being annoying and in bad taste. Here's the Bible book and verse on public show prayer.

Still, many Americans believe Christianity is under attack even if all we're doing is asking them forgodssake to just tone it down. The folks on FoxNews keep their alert flasher going about this for hours a week, between wringing their hands about the decline in the military budget which isn’t declining and worrying about the hordes of foreigners who keep coming in adding to the U.S. population which is almost entirely descended from foreigners who came in decades earlier, some of whom weren't even Christian at all...some of whom were even (Unitarians). In some columns the greatest threat to Christianity is the threat to our God-given right to carry machine guns. Other columnists think it’s the liberals trying to feed the poor out of the taxed incomes of rich people who are already worried sick about how unlikely it is that they will ever get into heaven unless it becomes a lot easier to fit camels through the eyes of needles.

But the greatest unifying fear among the writhing, fretful Christians out there is the danger that they will lose their sacred American right to marry someone who’d much rather be married to someone else. They feel it’s wrong that gay men might be allowed to marry other men rather than marrying their sisters or daughters, or that lesbians might marry other lesbians rather than being obligated to enter a sacred union with some good Christian man they feel zero attraction to. This holy right to an unhappy, frustrated and unfulfilling married life seems particularly sacred in the South and in the rural West.

Still the Right Wing columnists seem to think free choice is a bad thing in the land of the free.

The best argument for the superiority of their faith among today’s superChristians (the supercharged variety of Christian that is fully armed and believes in the sanctity of lower wages for working people) is that Christianity makes us better people. That going to church on a weekly basis makes us kinder and gentler and more generous, which is most definitely NOT to say that it makes you Liberal. Apparently, though, churchgoing and praying and feeling closer to God than all the other less devout losers you have to rub shoulders with every day does not, in fact, make people more generous or kinder or gentler. Quite the reverse. Of course this new information isn’t a reliable revelation handed down by some godly preacher in a $5000 suit who received it directly out of the sky. No, it turns out this information comes from scientists who did careful verifiable research on human behavior while they weren’t otherwise busy worshipping Satan.

Here's an article about this latest research from that unholy bastion of godless Communism, the Economist Magazine.

And, if you'll forgive me, some more science news on the topic from the LATimes.

Religion sometimes makes us better, sometimes worse, sometimes stupid. I give you Ben Carson, an interesting example of how a seemingly intelligent and well-educated man can come off looking like a damn fool because he refuses to acknowledge that science might be right.

What We Worry? The Big Shrug Over Climate Change.

As climate change denial ramped up I began to wonder where the prudent worriers in our economy had gone. Foremost among this doleful and boring but responsible fraternity are the insurers. Where were they? Why weren’t they siding with the climate change scientists and giving economic muscle to the scientific warnings? It appears there was some translation of risk warnings into dollar terms, but the message was very muted. It seldom reached the public conversation, if ever.

The insurance industry has been slow to warn. Here's an article about this.

The Guardian did report as early as 2011 that Lloyds had begun warning about climate change risks, but 2011 was hardly early. In 2014 they warned again.

In this 2013 article Smithsonian described the insurance pivot as an adjustment, a subtle turn of the dial. This was before they were purchased by the fossil fuel billionaires, the Koch Brothers.

In 2014 MotherJones wrote about how the insurance industry was largely ignoring or downplaying climate change.

I suspected this broad diffidence was because the insurance giants had been bought up by financial giants who were not insurers. An investment company is inclined to think fossil fuel profits are sexier than climate change warnings. They are likelier to tell the killjoy divisions to shut up and quit spoiling the party.

I think it was another case of Moneythink overriding our rational mind. If you are a large financial company your fiduciary responsibility (I call it a fiduciary excuse) to earn maximum profits overrides your responsibility as a citizen, your responsibility as a member of society and a comfortable beneficiary of that society.

I’ve read more since I posted about insurers' climate change denialism, and learned more about the evasions and muted warnings from insurers. Insurance policyholders are as likely to be deaf to warnings as insurers are to be dumb about the risks.

Which is where the media’s deafness comes in. (The news media's denialism has had a neat bag of tricks, as reported recently in a CNN opinion piece––why does critical thinking get relegated to the opinion pages anyway?) The sad habit of evenhanded coverage hasn’t helped. There is a habit among news divisions to “play it safe” by giving both sides of an argument equal weight, regardless of the merits of the opposing arguments. It's a bit like warning people that "There may or may not be a tornado coming. You decide." Some risks are too large to play that way, and climate change is one of them. It has been described by scientists as an existential risk for decades and the pussyfooting of media has enabled fossil fuel companies’ PR departments to sow doubt and paralyze our response. I compare this to the appeasers and America Firsters of the 1930s. We will need a WW2 scale mobilization to confront climate change, where a decade or two ago we might have confronted it without as much disruption.

Or maybe disruption is something the corporate class has anticipated and planned for. Disruption gives greater opportunity for control to those who have the resources and the positioning. For example, have corporations been buying options on lands that climate change would suddenly make viable, and buying up technologies we would desperately need (enabling certain fossil fuel villains to hop on a white horse and rescue us all once they’d reaped the maximum profit from the long con of climate change denial. Is this the kind of calculation that the sharper minds have been deployed to figure out? Vs. the less sexy calculation of risk and avoidance of risk.)

These articles address the problem that kicks in when insurers decide to abdicate instead of confronting risk. (From Lexology.com and from Reuters.

Instead of helping our massive economy address the risks and helping us put policies in place that reverse the risks, what do insurers do? I guess they shrug and give up. They pocket their winnings and leave the game.

The Nullification of Science

Exxon did this for decades. They'd discovered that continued use of fossil fuel would warm the climate, raise the oceans and make large growing areas into deserts. What did they do? They hid the information. Why? So the owners of oil shares could continue to reap high profits from peak oil and their top executives could pull down decades of multimillion dollar paychecks.

Recently we've learned that pesticides manufactured by powerful multinational corporations have begun killing off bees and butterflies necessary for the pollination of a large percentage of our food crops. But powerful multinational corporations know how to reach deep into academic research institutions and shut the science down. Because they sponsor those institutions. (Nobody else has enough money and they do. They hold the purse and the veto power.) These multinationals also can dictate government policy. A story on public radio yesterday told of how a USDA bee scientist was upsetting the pesticide companies with his findings. They shut him down.

The Climate Change Denial Business

The businesses who profited from the cancer delivery system known as cigarettes knew for decades how lethal they were, but they engaged in a long, deliberate and very successful coverup, bribing and intimidating scientists and lying to the news media and in sworn testimony. That was their business model.

We are seeing it again today, not with a lethal product line but with the careful and well-funded denial of what scientists have been warning us about for more than a decade: that our climate is warming because of fossil fuel use. And because civilization itself depends on existing climate patterns, rainfall patterns and temperature ranges this denial is endangering the survival of human life as we know it. We and our children are being put at grave risk to allow the fossil fuel giants to squeeze huge profits from peak oil. They don’t care what history might say about them because, as George W. Bush said “by the time that happens we’ll be dead.”

There's a new film out about the Denial Business. It's called MERCHANTS OF DOUBT. Big Oil is paying to suppress it.

Here are the main perpetrators in the climate change denial business, as reported by a Pulitzer Prize winning climate news service.

In The Guardian today: the Kochs refuse to testify about their climate change denial apparatus. Are the powerful allowed to plead the Fifth on the extinction of the human species?

Is Dishonesty The Best Policy?

Scott Walker is so good at driving Wisconsin into the ground he’s become a Republican superhero. People in Wisconsin love him for what he’s doing to them. Lower wages––hooray! Fewer jobs––hooray! Dumber citizens––hooray!

A conservative from the Daily Beast explains why this is so exciting(!!!)

“We create our own reality” ~Karl Rove (Meaning torture is what they say it is. If they do it it must not be torture.)

The New York Review of Books has an article describing how hard it was for the CIA to believe the White House really was giving them permission to torture.

If it takes a top scientist to understand how Republicans are lying, does it mean most people will keep believing the lies?

An interview in Salon explains a lot, but it won't be read much by people in working class bars.

Conservatives are beginning to worry that Google will begin giving a higher ranking to pages that don’t contain lies and misinformation about things like science, math, economics and law. Lying about these things is the GOP’s best strategy.

"Save us GOOGLE! You're our only hope!"

(Or: Can a kid who closes his eyes while he flies really blow up the Death Star?)

Republicans will need to hope Americans will stubbornly ignore the truth. The diehard Republican voters are a safe bet. They’re obedient. They ignore what they’re told to ignore. For them, dishonesty is the best policy. Ignorance is bliss.

Republican leadership says to states: ignore the federal laws you don’t like. The Confederacy lives!

The March of Stupid

Republican Chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee: "Why immunize my kids? They aren’t sick." (From Mother Jones)

James Inhofe, Republican Chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee: “How can there be global warming? It’s cold out today." (Reported at Vox.com)

The Loudest, Angriest Person Decides What Is True

Half of America doesn’t care what is true and what is false, they only care which they are supposed to believe. It’s a game between opposing sides and truth doesn’t matter to them. They don't care if Bill O'Reilly is a liar. They like him for being loud and angry, and that's enough.

When scientists tell us terrible things will happen if we don’t lower our fossil fuel use, Republicans simply fire the scientists. Cut off their mikes. Ban them from talking to anyone.

It doesn’t matter what is true. It only matters that their side is louder. That their side has bigger angrier bullies. That they have more oil billions powering their microphones. (It's a nasty but efficient mindset and easy to program people to believe.)

So they can shout down anyone telling the truth the way Bill O’Reilly does on FoxNews

… or GOPTV as it was meant to be called when it was invented in the Nixon White House.

Smells like team spirit, doesn’t it?

Truth used to belong to the loud, the more violent, the one willing to murder anyone who disagrees with them. That was in the bad old days.

Welcome back to the Dark Ages.

Letter to George Will

(George Will gave some advice to Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker about the stupidity of science denial. Which prompted me to write this letter.)

Mr. Will,

I sympathize with your situation, having to advise a Republican frontrunner to acknowledge science and reality. It must be embarrassing.

John McCain corrected a woman in the crowd during his campaign who said Obama was a Muslim. Then it seemed the only rational thing to do.

The problem is the Republican Party has spent the years since then catering to this same ignorant prejudice. Actually they’ve been doing it longer, if you consider Lee Atwater's and Roger Ailes' and Pat Buchanan’s not so subtle dog whistle bigotry. This past week we also have Giuliani’s ugly, ignorant remarks.

Why cater to ignorance? Because it’s worked for you. It’s elected right wing Republicans, each one further right than the last, each one more out of touch with reality. Each one more cynical and dishonest and nutty.

And this has made your party the cynical dishonest nutty bigoted party. It wins elections for you.

Well (and I realize it’s totally wrong to use this analogy) this kind of nutty cynical dishonest bigotry also helped Hitler win elections.

If it works it becomes compulsory? That seems to be the rationale Republicans have imported from the business world. It’s wrong and dangerous in both places. It’s endangering the climate our food supply is based on, it’s endangering our democracy, it’s endangering our economy, it’s endangering our future.

You have a lot of work to do unwinding this.

Of course, if you think it’s more important to carry water for the Republicans in next year’s election… if that’s more important to you and the other commentators on the right, God help us.