The Trump tax proposals

Desperate to show something, anything, that will deflect criticism that he is a loser who has not achieved anything of substance in his first 100 days and that he has in fact caved on many of his campaign promises and totally stabbed his supporters in the back, Donald Trump has released his tax ‘proposals’, a grandiose name for a vague “one page of double-spaced bullet points with some hefty margins” as Stephen Colbert said. Like with so much of what the Trump administration, it looks like the kind of thing that a middle school student who hasn’t done any research or even reading would come up with. But Derek Thompson does an analysis of it anyway though there is a long way to go before it has any hope of being implemented.
[Read more…]

An interesting argument against creationists

Religious believers tend to talk in vague generalities. I have found that asking believers detailed questions is a good way of responding to their statements. I have written before of my experiences when talking with those who talk glibly of heaven. I ask them whether people eat in heaven and, if so, where the food comes from and whether there are bathrooms and sewage systems to get rid of the waste, what people do all day, and so on. They tend to find the conversation distasteful. I do the same thing with people who say that their god speaks to them. I ask them whether he spoke in English, what kind of accent he had, whether anyone else was around to hear it, and why they did not record the conversation, since having god’s voice on tape would be sensational news. It becomes quickly obvious that they have not thought through their positions, since most people give their pious statements a pass. (For an example of the resulting entertaining conversations involving heaven and evil and free will, see here, here, and here, for some of the fun I had with some Jesus people I met on the street just outside my office. One of them heard about my posts and responded in the comments.)
[Read more…]

The roots of Trump’s deportation policy

Donald Trump is undoubtedly an awful president, a vain, needy, pathological liar and narcissist whose main goal in life seems to be to enrich himself and his family. But we should not let his awfulness result in our viewing his predecessors with rose-tinted glasses and seeing them in retrospect as better than they were. We must never forget, for example, that Barack Obama’s drone killings and policies in Libya and Yemen and other parts of the world were awful and his excessive claims of presidential power laid the foundations that Trump is now taking advantage of.
[Read more…]

Getting rid of the intentional foul in basketball

The NBA basketball championship playoffs are currently underway. Even though the Cleveland home team the Cavaliers are the defending champions, I am not a basketball fan and have not watched any of the games so far. Part of the problem is that it is a very fast moving game (when it is not stopped for timeouts and the like which are the bane of American sports but allow for plenty of commercials) and I do not know the finer points of tactics and strategy to fully appreciate what is going on.
[Read more…]

The pundits who supported Libyan regime change and now advocating the same for Syria

One of the enduring facts about the American media is that there is a group of influential members of the media and intellectuals who like to think of themselves as liberal but are reliable advocates for the use of military force and especially bombing the hell out of other countries in the name of ‘humanitarian intervention’. These people can be relied upon to cheer wars as long as it can be wrapped up in a gauze, however flimsy, that it will magically result in the emergence of a nation that is democratic and respects human rights and the rights of minorities. Of course, once the whole exercise goes sour as it almost always does, they studiously avert their gaze from the havoc they caused and look longingly for the next war for which they can advocate action.
[Read more…]

The book royalties racket

Like many academic writers, I make hardly any money on my books and write them mainly for the intellectual satisfaction they give me. The world of huge advances that are paid for books by politicians and celebrities occupy a totally different publishing world and is something that I have no knowledge of. I have long been curious as to what purpose such advances serve. What happens to people who get huge advances? Are the author’s royalties kept by the publisher until they have reached the amount of the advance? What happens if the book does not sell enough copies to justify the advance?
[Read more…]

Why are people so afraid?

The first time I heard about what later became known as the case of the elderly man who was randomly selected and shot dead on the street and whose killer posted it on Facebook was when my wife got a telephone alert from the university where she teaches telling people that a shooter was on the loose and asking people not on campus to stay away and those on campus to get into lockdown mode. The puzzling thing was that the message mentioned the location of the shooting and it was several miles away from the university and there was no indication that it had anything to do with the university nor that the shooter was heading towards it. So why the warning?
[Read more…]