You’ll never guess who is a leading thinker and has a great mind!

In checking over the proofs for my forthcoming book, I have also been checking the citations. One of my citations was to a quote from an essay by MIT physicist Seth Lloyd. The quote I used was “Unlike mathematical theorems, scientific results can’t be proved. They can only be tested again and again until only a fool would refuse to believe them”. It appeared in a compilation of short essays in a 2006 book titled What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty that consisted of contributions from more than 100 people who were asked to write a few paragraphs on the following prompt:

Great minds can guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it. (Diderot called it having the “spirit de divination.”) What do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?

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Exposing the ugly underbelly of Democratic establishment politics

The Democratic party leadership has a lot more in common with Republicans and the Trump administration than it has with its own base and hence it should not come as a surprise that it finds ways to maneuver against policies that its supporters want but goes against the interests of the ruling classes. This struggle has come into the open as progressives are launching primary challenges against veteran Democratic lawmakers and the latter scramble to find ways to defend their penchant to ally with Republicans tio undermine the progressive agenda.
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A short history on US meddling in foreign elections

Tomorrow special counsel Robert Mueller will be testifying before congress and there is intense speculation about what he might say. You can bet that the Democrats will be trying to get him to imply that Russian meddling in 2016 helped elect Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

I think that we can all agree that it is wrong for one nation to meddle in the elections of another nation in order to sway it in favor of someone they feel will be of benefit to them. But what is problematic is the way that Americans sanctimoniously condemn such actions when other nations do it to them but think it is perfectly fine when the US does the same thing, and worse, to other nations.

Mehdi Hasan provides a brief history of the utterly egregious meddling that the US has done in other countries (including Russia) that go well beyond email hacks and Facebook fake news that the Russians are accused of doing. And of course that does not even include things like sponsoring coups, assassinating other countries’ leaders, and actual invasions.

Good answer to a health care question

I am not sure how many readers of this blog check out the website Quora. People post questions on a wide variety of topics and knowledgeable people reply. I usually check out the physics questions and have been impressed with the quality of many of the the answers. But occasionally my eye catches questions on other topics and such as this one since it is a topic I blog about a lot.
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Can someone please explain?

I like to think of myself as an unequivocal supporter to the LGBTQIA community in their striving to be treated just the same as any other community, be accorded the same rights, and be free of discrimination and harassment. But I am also aware that I am not well versed in all the issues and nuances involved in that struggle and there is little real value that I can add to that discussion. Fortunately, there are other bloggers on FtB such as Crip Dyke who know much more about these issues so apart from giving general support, I tend to ‘stay in my own lane’ (as the kids say these days) and stick to topics that I know at least a little about or are greatly neglected by other FtB bloggers. In the greatly neglected category I mean, of course, cricket.
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The patronizing attitude of the Democratic establishment and Trump’s exploitation of it

When Donald Trump launched his racist attacks on the four Democratic progressive congresswomen of color, he was undoubtedly encouraged to do so by the way that others who support the Democratic party establishment had earlier criticized them and the way they did so. Take for example, Jennifer Rubin, a neoconservative and Never Trumper who is a columnist in the Washington Post. She, like other neoconservatives (Bill Kristol, Max Boot) who were solidly Republican but have become disenchanted with Trump possibly because in his election campaign he condemned the wars that they instigated and did not want to expand into new wars, now feel free to advise Democrats on what they should do. They hate the progressives in the Democratic party with a passion because they are opposed to the current wars and are not in favor of using the US military to further the neo-imperialist agenda.
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