Corey S. Powell provides a history of the Hubble-LeMaitre law and the efforts to pin down a precise value of the Hubble constant that plays a significant role in determining not only the age of the universe but also its ultimate fate. Like the age of the Earth, the value of the Hubble constant, and thus the age of the universe, has shifted considerably over time.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says something that I too have been saying for ages and should be repeated over and over again.
“We don’t have a left party in the United States,” the congresswoman said. “The Democratic Party is not a left party. The Democratic Party is a center or center-conservative party.”
“We can’t even get a floor vote on Medicare for All. Not even a floor vote that gets voted down. We can’t even get a vote on it. So this is not a left party,” she told interviewer, journalist and best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
I doubt that the political establishment and its media supporters will change their framing of the parties. They have a vested interest in limiting the range of political debate in the country and the best way is to pretend that the two parties represent full left-right range of acceptable political views, rather than what it is, a center-right, crazy-right spectrum.
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It looks like Hillary Clinton is determined to inject herself into the election campaign and in the most negative way. She has issued a scathing attack on Bernie Sanders, showing once again that the Democratic party establishment is pulling out all the stops to prevent him from becoming the nominee, as the Iowa caucuses approach. She has even “refused to commit to endorsing Sanders should he win the primary this year”, which is pretty shocking. She is essentially saying that she would rather have Donald Trump win than Sanders.
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The utter failure of mainstream media in the US provides a source of never-ending articles as new debacles quickly follow the old. Matt Taibbi analyzes the role that the media played in aiding Donald Trump’s rise and that they are doing the same thing now to Bernie Sanders.
When prominent media voices compare the Trump and Sanders movements, it’s always the same insult: Trump sucks and is evil/wrong, and Sanders is like Trump. The establishment fantasy is that both are illegitimate opportunists.
The diagnosis of Trump is that he rode to power appealing to a collection of humanity’s darkest impulses, in particular racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Few other explanations, importantly even negative ones (like that Trump took cynical advantage of both racism and legitimate economic grievances), are accepted.
The explanation for Sanders is naiveté. Neither the politician nor his followers understand how the world works. They want expensive things for free and blame billionaires when their actual gripe is with reality. Oh, and theirs is also a movement for sexists and anti-Semites and people who refuse to accept the unique role of racism in America.
Let me say right off the bat that I don’t think newspaper endorsements matter that much anymore. Given the proliferation of sources of information, I don’t think that support of a newspaper, even one that has such a wide reach as the New York Times, carries much impact. What such endorsements give us is a window into the thinking of the political establishment. So the endorsements tell us more about the newspaper’s interests than the virtues of the candidates. They say that there are two visions being put forward by the Democratic party, the realist and the radical and that Klobuchar represents the former and Warren the latter.
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When I saw the title of this article that said Reasons not to scoff at ghosts, visions and near-death experiences, I assumed that it was going to make the case for the plausibility of things that I definitely scoff at. But what the author is arguing is that such beliefs can be therapeutic for some people and thus of some value and we should not too quickly move to disabuse people of those beliefs.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson once memorably wrote: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons”, at a time when spoons were often made of silver and thus valuable and the target of thieves. Emerson was likely adapting a sentiment attributed to Samuel Johnson by his biographer James Boswell. The sentiment expressed a warning about those who spoke too much about their own virtues, that it should make their claims to virtue suspect. It is similar to the Shakespearean “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” in Hamlet to signify that one loses credibility by being too insistent.
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In science, collective judgments by credible experts that have passed through institutional filters are what make up reliable knowledge. These should not be confused with ‘facts’ which is the term given to the things that are directly measured. And yet, the media often conflate the two and in this article in Scientific American, Naomi Oreskes warns that doing so does a disservice when it comes to ‘fact-checking’ politicians concerning climate change warnings.
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