Using the mantle of science to advance reactionary views

At the dawn of what is now called the New Atheist movement, I proudly called myself one, seeing myself as an ally in the fight against religious obscurantism. I now feel embarrassed by being identified with that label and distance myself from it. This is not because of what the label itself might signify. Labels (and language) are malleable and transitory and the meaning that I ascribed to it, that it meant that I believed that at a fundamental level, science was incompatible with anything at all supernatural which, inter alia, means that there are no gods of any kind, is something I still believe.

The problem is that New Atheists are now identified not by any definition but by a group of people who wrapped themselves with that label in the early days and thus is now associated with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, along with those who later chose to be aligned with them. Three of them (Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens) have been revealed to have deplorable political and social views unconnected to the ones that attracted me. I now feel that the New Atheist label cannot be reclaimed from those associations and so feel compelled to abandon it in order to avoid being grouped in with them and their views.

Dennett and Hitchens have since died but others have joined with Dawkins and Harris to become part of the culture wars, moving away from dealing just with science and religion and going on to attack postmodernism and so-called ‘woke’ ideologies that they attack in the name of science. In the process, they have started to espouse deeply reactionary views and seem to now be more at home with right wingers and even MAGA types, as can be seen by their vociferous opposition to what they consider to be censorship by the left and what they call ‘cancel culture’. Under the banner of defending free speech and science, they now defend those who have been condemned for their sexist, Islamophobic, racist, and transphobic views.
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‘Trump’s Folly’

So what has been happening to the Lincoln Pool?

What is clear is that repairs to fix the peeling paint liner are nowhere close to being completed. Trump may have tried to hide the disaster by erecting a fence around the pool to keep out observers but unfortunately for him, it turns out that there is a live cam feed from a camera atop the Washington Monument that is pointed directly at the pool so that anyone can see the status of the pool at any time. As you can see for yourself, as of today it is still empty of water and looks like a mess, with a gash in the paint lining running right down the middle for the length of the pool.

Meanwhile the administration is still pathetically clinging to the fiction that vandals are behind the problems.

Work to correct the cracking and flaking liner at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is underway, weeks after the government dropped charges against people accused of vandalizing the pool, citing instead the “botched” renovation efforts.
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Workers could be seen power washing the pool’s basin and using caulk applicators on the perimeter expansion joint. Some workers ripped up large sheets of damaged liner, and used leaf blowers and brooms to sweep up smaller pieces of liner debris.

Asked about the work, the Interior Department referred The Washington Post to new signage posted at the east end of the pool. Those signs said that the National Park Service and contractors are “repairing areas damaged by vandals and completing a historic effort to clean, fix, and beautify the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Memorial Pool.”

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Can Canada actually join the EU?

In response to my post wondering why Trump hates Canada and suggesting that that country may look elsewhere to trade and even join the EU or BRICS, there were some very informative comments about other options to those extreme steps. As result, I decided to look into this topic more closely and discovered that other serious commentators have explored various options

The short answer is that while it is theoretically possible for Canada to join the EU, it is also unlikely since it would have to surmount major obstacles, a major one of which is the long land border with the US that would require more stringent customs checks. (Recall the thorny issues with the much shorter Ireland-Northern Ireland border after Brexit took the UK out of the customs union (that allowed free transport of goods over national borders) while Ireland stayed in.)

Back in January 2025, just after Trump took office, an editorial from The Economist made the case for why Canada should join the EU, citing Trump’s openly expressed contempt for Canadian sovereignty and its then-prime minister Justin Trudeau. It argued that both Canada and the EU had much to gain from such a union, and that Trump’s recent jingoism and threats of tariffs have only made the case stronger.
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RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine crusade may have led to the deaths of 83 Samoans

RFK Jr has been a long-time vaccine skeptic. When he was up for his senate confirmation hearings for the post of secretary of health and human services, he downplayed that. But there was an incident in 2019 when he went to Samoa to spread his vaccine denial and afterwards there was a deadly outbreak of measles there. He had been chair and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit group known for its anti-vaccine activism. In July 2018, two children died in Samoa even though they had been vaccinated and Kennedy and CHD exploited that tragedy to cast doubt on vaccines. It later turned out that the fault was not the MMR vaccine itself but that it had been improperly prepared and thus contaminated and two nurses were criminally charged and pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

When questioned about that during his senate conformation hearings, he said that his visit to Samoa had nothing to do with vaccines. But now a letter, obtained through lawsuit filed against the State Department by the AP and the Guardian with the aid of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, has surfaced that shows that the visit was all about vaccines.
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Why does Trump hate Canada?

Trying to find meaning in Trump’s actions is often futile since he seems to be driven by irrational impulses. But his antagonism towards Canada is particularly bizarre given that Canada is a neighbor with which the US shares a longer border and the two nations have been allies for so long, sharing so many cultural features that people can easily move back and forth across the border and unless one is very sensitive to linguistic nuances, one cannot tell if one is speaking to an American or Canadian.

And yet Trump seems particularly angry at that nation, periodically blowing up and the latest display came about when trade talks between the two nations ended abruptly. This article describes how the long-running trade talks between the two countries went from showing progress to suddenly collapsing late last Friday night.

A month of intense talks to stave off new U.S. tariffs on Canada and soften the ones previously imposed by the Trump administration had been yielding steady progress. But they collapsed suddenly, setting in motion an all-out trade war between the two nations.

The sticking points were many. In the last few hours, negotiators clashed over Canadian rules promoting French-language movies and shows online, as well as the Trump administration’s demands to dictate Canada’s steel tariffs on other countries. Canada, in turn, insisted on more generous treatment for its autos, electric vehicles and products made with metal — and ultimately backed away from its offer to cooperate on the Keystone XL pipeline that President Trump has long desired, people familiar with the negotiations said.

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What socialists stand for

One of the features of the current election cycle is the way that the Democratic Socialists of America and other candidates who are not DSA members but share many of its socialist values have been winning elections and shifting the center of gravity of the Democratic Party to the left.

Nathan J. Robinson thinks that a socialist moment has arrived in the US and says that this is because what the DSA and socialists stand for has become more clearly defined at this difficult time and is thus better distinguished from the moribund neoliberal centrists that have dominated the Democratic party.

The DSA program is called “Workers Deserve More!” Socialists lead by saying that all people have certain fundamental rights: we have a right to a decent job that pays well, where we are not exploited or abused; we have the right to good, healthy food, to a quality public education, to basic healthcare. We have the right to good roads, good public transit, and fair elections that aren’t bought by billionaires. We have the right to have our tax money spent to build parks and libraries, not to fight wars that the majority of Americans are against. For socialists, these rights are non-negotiable. If a society is not fulfilling them, for each and every individual, then it is failing. And since everyone can see that these rights are not being fulfilled for everyone, the 21st century U.S. is failing in its basic obligations, and therefore there need to be major political and economic changes.
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Socialists are the ones who think: Okay, we have a bunch of problems that people are facing, what can we do about them? Look at Zohran Mamdani in New York City. His campaign was laser-focused on the things that mattered most to people: the exorbitant costs of rent, childcare and groceries, and the speed of buses. In office he has focused first and foremost on delivering things people will see and feel immediately, whether that’s removing unsightly scaffolding, filling potholes quickly, or expanding free childcare. As Kyle Kulinski says, “what Zohran is doing is reminding people that the government has the ability to improve your life.”
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The rise and fall of the evil Sackler family and the opioid addiction crisis

I have written multiple times before about the opioid overdoses crisis and the major role in its growth played by the Sackler family and their family-owned company Purdue Pharma. I just finished reading the excellent book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021) by Patrick Radden Keefe that carefully reveals the sordid history of the family in creating the crisis, something that the family went to great lengths to conceal from the public. He shows that while other companies also manufactured, distributed, and marketed the opioids that have caused so much suffering and deaths and continues to do so even today, the Sacklers played a special role in creating the crisis.

Drugs obtained from the poppy flower (opium and morphine) had long been known to be powerful in combating pain but were prescribed and used very sparingly because they were known to be highly addictive. They also carried with them social stigmas. Opium was associated with seedy underworld opium dens where people smoked pipes in dreamy semi-conscious states while morphine was a powerful drug that was injected and mainly used to treat incurable pain such as from cancer and was also used as a palliative at the end of life. Both those associations discouraged casual use.

What the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma did was develop and market a drug based on the opiod oxycodone under the brand name OxyContin. They claimed that they had eliminated the addictive aspects of the drug by encasing oxycodone in a coating that allowed the drug to be released slowly over a 12-hour period. They said that this eliminated the immediate highs and the subsequent lows of the drug that led to addiction. Furthermore, the drug could now be delivered in a tablet form, even though it required a prescription, and they made it seem like a mild over-the-counter painkiller like aspirin and acetaminophen. They marketed it with a vengeance to physicians and pharmacists, claiming that it should be the painkiller of choice for even everyday pain like that associated with sprains and arthritis and backache, and used their lobbying clout with the FDA and DEA to avoid close scrutiny of their claims by regulators in those agencies, even though they had little or no data to support those claims.
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Trump plays at being an aeronautical engineer

Trump is known for his obsessions, wildly irrational beliefs that he holds on to despite any evidence to the contrary. One is his hatred of windmills. While that is well known, less known is his obsession with the technology used to rapidly accelerate fighter jets from the decks of aircraft carriers. Older ships have largely a mechanical system of catapults but more modern ships have shifted to an electromagnetic system. Trump, for some reason, hates the newer systems.

What is troubling is that he seems determined to impose his will on a new aircraft carrier that is being built and demanding that they change the system to his preferred one.
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Insecure men retreating into fantasy worlds

There is a familiar pattern to stories of people with great wealth. It starts with the first generation becoming wealthy, usually by luck (they find oil on their property, say) or by developing some idea that they then ruthlessly exploit people and the earth’s resources to create their wealth. And then you have the subsequent generations that inherits that wealth. Some of them continue their ancestral business but others drift into hedonistic lifestyles where they do nothing productive at all but indulge their fantasies.

Jon Ronson writes about how, via his son, he stumbled onto the story of Chris Mark, whose great-grandfather Clayton had founded the steel company Clayton Mark & Company and made a fortune. Mark does not seem to have done anything on his own with his life but instead has nurtured the dream of using his inherited wealth to becoming a new Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine, notorious for living in a mansion that was populated by scantily clad young women known as ‘bunnies’. (As far as we know, those women were not underage, which distinguishes Hefner from Jeffrey Epstein.)

Mark created his own mansion in the form of a massive medieval castle that he built in 2010 in rural Connecticut, complete with spires, towers, turrets, gargoyles, and a drawbridge. His dream seemed to be to entice attractive young women to come there and dress up and act like ‘princesses’, tiaras and all, who would curtsey before him and say things like “Yes, my lord”, and from among whom he would pick one to be his ‘queen’, while the others would have sex with one another. The lure for these women was that he told them he was producing a reality show for Netflix called 101 Princesses. Sadly, in these days of increasingly lurid and exploitative TV, this seemed plausible.
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