The fixer, the preacher’s son, his wife, & two young studs

Jerry Falwell was an evangelical preacher and the founder of Liberty University, a college that expects its students to abide by strict Christianity-based rules prohibiting drinking, dancing, homosexuality, and of course anything involving sex among its students. Falwell was the founder of something called the Moral Majority that represented the first major concerted effort to join at the hip evangelical Christianity with right wing politics and make them into a potent political force for reactionary policies, leading one wag to say that “The Moral Majority is neither”.
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How and why police brutality is institutionalized

On the latest episode of his show Patriot Act, Hasan Minhaj explains why the many cases in which police kill unarmed mostly black people and escape any punishment is not only due to the specifics of each case but that it is encouraged by a system in which the training of police encourages immediate violent action and the unions and the laws are designed to give police immunity from the consequences of their actions, however egregious they might be. In other words, this is a systemic problem that cannot be blamed on a few ‘rotten apples’.

Parents risking children’s lives

When I was a boy, a diagnosis of leukemia was pretty much a death sentence and in fact a school friend of mine died from the disease. Thanks to advances in modern medicine, nowadays many forms of childhood leukemia can be treated and cured. So it is unconscionable when parents decide that they want to treat their child with ‘alternative’ treatments that will likely result in death. One couple in Florida decided to skip the chemotherapy session for their four-year old child and fled the state with him.

Authorities caught up with them in Kentucky and took the child back to continue the treatment, and the child now lives with his grandmother.

After the boy, who the BBC is not naming, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in April his parents opted to treat him using cannabis, oxygen therapy, herbs and alkaline water.

Medical cannabis is legal in Florida.
…

Chemotherapy is often associated with debilitating side effects, but many types of modern chemotherapy cause only mild problems.

According to St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, about 98% of children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia go into remission within weeks of beginning treatment, and about 90% of child patients are eventually cured.

The report does not say if the parents are highly religious. The fact that they sought to treat the child with cannabis and other things and not prayer suggest they are not. Instead, they are probably those who, like the anti-vaxxers, think that they know better than what modern science and medicine says are the best treatments for disease.

The parents have lost custody of their son but are planning to file an appeal.

Bye, bye, John! So happy that you have been kicked out

John Bolton, an incredibly ruthless neoconservative warmonger who seemed eager to use the US military to attack and invade any and all perceived enemies of the US, especially if they were also designated enemies of Israel, has been fired by Donald Trump from his influential position as National Security Advisor.

As is the case with this chaotic administration, there are conflicting reports of why he was fired and how. Bolton claimed he resigned while Trump insists he was fired. The days are long gone when firings were papered over with fake expressions of regret.

Trump tweeted: “I informed John Bolton last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House. I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the administration, and therefore I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning. I thank John very much for his service.”

He added: “I will be naming a new National Security Advisor next week.”

Bolton instantly tweeted back: “I offered to resign last night and President Trump said, ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow.’”

Bolton’s dismissal was unexpected in the White House, which about an hour earlier had announced a press conference involving Bolton and the secretaries of state and treasury.

Bolton had taken consistently hawkish positions on major foreign policy issues that had frequently clashed with Trump, who had sought close relationships with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un.

What does it mean about US policy? Who knows? There seems to be no coherent policy, just the whims of an impulsive and erratic president. It may be that Trump just got sick of seeing Bolton’s walrus mustache up close, since it is known that he likes people to be clean shaven.

But one fewer ultra-aggressive warmonger who has the ear of the president has to be considered a positive development.

He’s not going to last long

[UPDATE: Neil Jacobs, the acting administrator of NOAA and himself a career meteorologist facing a potentially hostile audience of weather scientists at a meeting in Huntsville, Alabama who had threatened to walk out on his talk, tried to smooth over the conflict by tearfully thanking the Birmingham scientists in the audience for their work. The semi-apology seemed to have been accepted.]

There has been much publicity over the absurdity of Donald Trump claiming that Alabama was in the path of Hurricane Dorian when it was not. National Weather Service scientists in Birmingham immediately corrected it as they should, since warning residents that they are in the path of a major storm when they are not is a serious matter. Trump then doubled down on his claim by showing a doctored NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) weather map that showed Alabama in the projected path. But the most serious aspect of this was when an unsigned press release came from NOAA (the NWS is overseen by NOAA) saying that earlier forecasts did include Alabama, implicitly rebuking the NWS scientists.
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This is unnerving

I am someone who thinks that self-driving cars are the future and am not opposed to them. But I was not aware that they had already been allowed on public streets. This unnerving video shows a driver and passenger in a Tesla self-driving car fast asleep while speeding along the Massachusetts turnpike. Tesla says that drivers should be awake and have their hands on the wheel, ready to take control if necessary.

This driver has way more confidence in this new technology than I have. I would not have the nerve to fall asleep like that.

Here we go again, trying to argue that science proves the existence of god

Apparently yet another new book is out that tries to make the scientific case for god’s existence. According to the publisher’s blurb, these are the five main arguments “for the existence of God and of intelligent design of both the universe and life.”

1.) Evidence showing that the material universe had a beginning; 2.) Evidence showing that, from its beginning, the universe was been finely tuned to allow for the possibility of life; 3.) Evidence from biology showing that after the universe came into being, large amounts of genetic information similar to computer code came about in DNA that made, and continue to make, life possible; 4.) Evidence from research conducted at the University of Virginia School of Medicine showing that the brain does not create consciousness, but rather, that the brain can be compared to a cell phone or a radio that receives consciousness that originates somewhere else, and then integrates it with the body; 5.) Evidence from quantum mechanics and a number of other sources that consciousness or mind—the medium of thought—is nonlocal and appears to be present everywhere.

This book will likely appeal to those believers who seek to find some scientific sounding justification for their beliefs that goes beyond saying that they believe because they want to or need to believe or because they grew up believing. The link above tells you how to get a free Kindle download before September 13.

My own forthcoming book THE GREAT PARADOX OF SCIENCE: Why its conclusions can be relied upon even though they cannot be proven seeks to challenge some of the misapprehensions about the nature of science that underlies such arguments.

The Taliban meeting reportedly collapsed because of Trump’s ego

The surprise announcement by Donald Trump that he had canceled the secret meeting he had scheduled at Camp David with the leaders of the Taliban and the Afghan government has led to a lot of speculation as to what the deal might have contained and the real reasons for the cancellation. No one really buys Trump’s reason that it was because of the bombing on Thursday that killed a US soldier, because there had been no agreement about a ceasefire and both sides had been continuing hostilities anyway.
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Women’s rights and equality

Victoria Batemen, director of studies, fellow and college lecturer in economics at Gonville and Caius College at the University of Cambridge, argues that making the world more free, fair, and prosperous begins with giving women control over their own bodies to do with as they like, which includes them having the right to wear as much or as little clothing as they like and to do sex work.
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