As a result of science’s great achievements in giving us reliable and accurate knowledge, it has tremendous credibility. Unfortunately, that increase in credibility has not been matched by a corresponding increase in the public’s awareness of how science acquires that knowledge and the limitations on it. This makes it possible to dazzle people with ‘science’.
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Once again, a person with access to high-powered weapons has killed a large number of people, this time in Las Vegas. What struck me was that this person fired from the 32nd floor of a hotel at a crowd on a plaza below who were attending a country music festival. The fact that there seemed to be only one shooter and yet over fifty people died and scores more were injured despite the shooter being about 400 feet away from them suggests a highly dense crowd and powerful, rapid-fire weaponry.
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The protests during the playing of the national anthem before professional sports events has caused some controversy with Donald Trump, as usual, inflaming the situation. In an earlier post, I asked why this practice even existed since it seemed to me to be so silly. Many people have criticized the protesting players for injecting politics into sports but as Justin Levin, the author of a “history thesis on sports as instruments of domestic mobilization during the Vietnam War”, writes, it was the introduction of the national anthem into these events that was an overtly political act to serve an overtly political purpose, to stifle dissent that was erupting during the Vietnam war.
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As the humanitarian situation in Puerto Rico continues to worse, Donald Trump has as usual tried to have it multiple ways, blaming the lack of quick response on Puerto Rico being an island, then saying that his administration has done a wonderful job in relief efforts, and when it is pointed out that it has not done so, blaming lazy Hispanic people and their shiftless leaders, because he knows that attacking people of color plays well with his supporters.
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Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) wrote an essay titled That to study philosophy is to learn to die. It is not the cheeriest of slogans for the purposes of recruiting students to study the subject but there is no question that philosopher David Hume learned that lesson well. One of the most interesting features of the well-written book The Infidel and the Professor by Dennis C. Rasmussen that is an intellectual biography of the friendship between David Hume and Adam Smith, was its treatment of how Hume viewed his impending death and the great deal of attention that was paid to it during his last days.
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Now that direct attempts at repealing and replacing Obamacare have been stymied at least for awhile, the author of the latest failed move Lindsey Graham admits that he had little or no idea about health care or what he was doing. And why should he? Their only goal was to kill Obamacare, not provide health care to people.
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Jonathan Chait is a columnist in New York magazine. Friends sometimes send me links to his article because they think he presents a sensible, liberal, perspective. I have never been impressed by him, just as I have never been impressed by Nicholas Kristoff, another columnist much favored by liberals. Alex Pareene captures well what I don’t like about Chait’s work. He says that the goal of neoliberal Democrats like Chait is to prevent the Democratic party from moving further to the left than the boundaries set by (say) the Clintons.
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Listen to this short speech given by Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria, head of the US Air Force Academy, to all 4,000 cadets and faculty and staff at the institution, after words got out that racial slurs had been found written on message boards at the academy’s preparatory school. Donald Trump could learn something from him.
Cue the white nationalists and neo-Nazis whining about how Silveria is a big old meanie who is infringing on their free speech rights.
The Republicans have developed a good con game, acting as if they are strategic whizzes, and the media tend to play along with them, keeping Democrats off-balance and on the defensive. What is worse is that the neoliberals within the Democratic party ranks also play along with this charade since it enables them to prevent the party from adopting more progressive stances
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Pete Dolack estimates that about $1.4 trillion dollars are siphoned out of the US health care system each year because of its private, for-profit nature, more than enough to pay for a single-payer system. How does he arrive at this figure? He calculates the average per-capita expenditure on health care for Britain, Canada, France, and Germany for the years 2011 to 2016 and arrives at $4,392 per year. For the US the figure is more than twice that at $8,924. If you take the difference and multiply that by the US population of 317 million, the excess comes out to $1.44 trillion.
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