Establishing non-existence in science

The so-far unsuccessful search to find direct evidence for the existence of dark matter is raising an issue in science that is often misunderstood and rarely gets the attention it deserves. And that issue is how we know in science that something does not exist. I discuss that in some detail in my book The Great Paradox of Science (yes, yet another plug for those who have not read it to buy it!) because it is hard to understand the logic of scientific progress without it. The history of science is replete with things that were once thought to exist but are no longer so. The aether and phlogiston are two famous example and another is N-rays. Trying to understand why we think those entities no longer exist will enable us to better understand when it might happen that dark matter is also thought to not exist.
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Barack Obama was a mediocre president and is now a terrible ex-president

Despite some vague gestures towards progressivism early on in his life, Barack Obama clearly saw that being a Wall Street-loving neoliberal while spouting lofty rhetoric was his ticket to bigger things. After largely squandering away his chance while president to strive for major accomplishments, since leaving office, he has been indulging in extremely ostentatious self-glorification, as Liza Featherstone writes.

He’s distinguished himself as an enemy of labor and friend of racist cops. NBA players began to go on strike last August after Jacob Blake, a black man, was shot by police seven times in front of his kids, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Amid a national uprising over the shooting and many other acts of racist police brutality, Obama called LeBron James and players’ union leader Chris Paul and urged them to get back on the court and finish the playoffs, which they did.
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How Trump blew it on infrastructure

After much back and forth, the US Senate has finally passed an infrastructure bill. The bill has a total cost of one trillion dollars and was arrived at after weeks of haggling in which Republicans fought to reduce it from the more ambitious plan that Joe Biden and progressive Democrats had initially wanted. In the end 19 Republicans voted for it, joining all 50 Democrats, and Biden hailed the compromise as a sign that the much sought-after unicorn of bipartisanship was not dead.
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New information about the outing of leading Catholic official

I wrote two weeks ago about the resignation of a high-ranking Catholic official, Monsignor Jeffrey Burill, the general secretary of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, after a Catholic publication named The Pillar used cellphone data to deduce that he was a frequent user of Grindr, the queer dating app, and regularly visited gay bars. I wondered at the time whether this exposure was due to homophobia and it appears that it was.

In an interview with Michael O’Loughlin, a national correspondent at the Catholic media organization America, the radio program On The Media provides some background on The Pillar, that it is a small but virulently anti-gay organization dedicated to getting rid of all gay Catholic priests from the church.
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Why the Sackler deal is so bad

The legal cases brought by so many state attorneys general and individuals against the odious Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma was responsible for so many opioid deaths, is going before a bankruptcy judge this week who will decide on a plea deal brought by some state attorneys general.

John Oliver gives a masterful expose of why the deal that has been proposed is such a bad one but will likely get approved. Basically the deal is such that the Sacklers, while pretending to pay billions, will actually get off very lightly by having their considerable personal assets mostly protected and will also be given sweeping blanket immunity from the lawsuits of those who did not agree to be part of this deal and even future lawsuits. They will not even have to plead guilty to any personal wrongdoing in the case, blaming it all on the company even though they were very hands-on in driving the practices that led to massive rates of addiction.

The bankruptcy judge hearing the case has a history of being sympathetic to these kinds of deals which is why the Sacklers shopped around so that they could appear before him in the small town of White Plains, NY. This case shows how the rich can manipulate the legal system to their benefit.

I hope that this show helps to create a big enough uproar that he has second thoughts about letting them get off so easy.

Good riddance to Andrew Cuomo

The governor of New York has resigned following an avalanche of criticism from all sides after a damning investigative report was released by the attorney general of the state of New York Letitia James that he was a serial abuser of women.

I have to admit that I was surprised by the resignation. Cuomo has the reputation of being a ruthless bare-knuckle political infighter and I expected him to put pressure on state legislators to not remove him by impeachment. I can only surmise that he has found that he does not have enough support among them to win that fight or that more revelations are on the way of even more serious allegations.

Will the new climate change report change minds?

The new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lays out the basis for “the most up-to-date physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science, and combining multiple lines of evidence from paleoclimate, observations, process understanding, and global and regional climate simulations.”

The warnings are getting more and more dire, though the situation is not yet hopeless.

Earth is getting so hot that temperatures in about a decade will probably blow past a level of warming that world leaders have sought to prevent, according to a report released Monday that the United Nations called a “code red for humanity.”

“It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse,” said report co-author Linda Mearns, a senior climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

But scientists also eased back a bit on the likelihood of the absolute worst climate catastrophes.

The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which calls climate change clearly human-caused and “unequivocal” and “an established fact,” makes more precise and warmer forecasts for the 21st century than it did last time it was issued in 2013.
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The 3,000-plus-page report from 234 scientists said warming is already accelerating sea level rise and worsening extremes such as heat waves, droughts, floods and storms. Tropical cyclones are getting stronger and wetter, while Arctic sea ice is dwindling in the summer and permafrost is thawing. All of these trends will get worse, the report said.

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Biggest life expectancy drop since WWII

In a reasonably healthy society one would expect life expectancy to rise or at least approach a plateau as the limits to which we can extend life (assuming that there is a limit) get reached. Dropping life expectancy should be a source of serious concern since it implies that something is seriously out of whack. So the recent dramatic drop in life expectancy in the US has to be a cause for alarm.

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Great diving performance in Tokyo Olympics

Diving, like gymnastics, involves a lot of acrobatics in the air and it takes place too quickly for me to be able to judge it in real time, which tells you something about how difficult it must be to judge the event. The only indicator I have for how good it is at the very end. In the case of gymnastics, it is the landing. In the case of diving, it is how small a splash the diver makes upon entry into the water. In the Tokyo Olympics Chinese diver Quan Hongchan broke all manner of records with her gold-medal winning performance. Even an ignorant observer like me could tell that she was spectacular.


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