The State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have backed down and said that they will follow the order of a federal judge that the Executive Orders on visitors and refugees that Donald Trump signed and caused great confusion will no longer be implemented, returning the country to the status quo ante.
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When the Intelligent Design movement started there were four key players. The founder was a professor of law at Berkeley named Phillip Johnson who cast a legal eye at the evidence on favor of evolution and wrote a book Darwin on Trial that argued that the case for evolution had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. He was the brains behind the so-called ‘Wedge Strategy’ that sought to undermine naturalism, staring by gradually undermining the idea that methodological naturalism was an integral part of science.
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I was going out for a dinner engagement last week when I read the news that the acting attorney general Sally Yates had sent a memo to the staff that they should not defend Donald Trump’s Executive Orders on visitors and refugees that targeted Muslim nations because she felt that they were not legally defensible nor right nor just. During the dinner, I discussed this with friends and we predicted that she would be fired by Trump and sure enough, by the time I got home that had already happened, accompanied by a statement that had all the trademarked pettiness of Trump.
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We are living in a remarkable time when the government seems to be deliberately scorning the constitutional system of checks and balances that has been so carefully created. Subverting the principles of the constitution for venal and partisan reasons and political expediency has been going on for a long time but what is new is how brazen the current efforts are. The Customs and Border Protection officers ignoring the rulings of several federal judges that they stay the implementation of Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration and refuges pending full evaluation was one step. The fact that Trump did not ask the CBP to follow the judicial orders means that they will see him as giving tacit approval of their defiance.
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Reader Jason sent me a link to this article that has more on the raid by the US forces, authorized by Donald Trump, that killed innocent people in Yemen that I wrote about a few days ago. Among the dead was an 8-year old girl whose father and 16-year old brother, both US citizens, had been murdered in separate attacks authorized by then president Obama.
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If any of us could trace our family tree back far enough, right to the very beginning, then we might expect that we should all converge on LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, the organism from which all life on Earth evolved. But as Addy Pross writes in his book What is Life? (2012), the tree of life metaphor that Charles Darwin introduced may break down once you get as far back as the Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya kingdoms.
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Back in 1988, the comic strip Doonesbury ran a series of six comic strips that poked fun at academic stereotypes based on ethnicity. They re-ran the series last week and you can see all six, starting with the first one here that I have also reproduced below.
Ben Rosenfeld provides a list of five basic improv techniques and an important one is the “Yes, and …” where you follow up on whatever the other person says, that you never ignore it and pursue your own line of thought. You have to go with the flow and that requires a great deal of quick-wittedness.
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Some of you may be aware of COINTELPRO (acronym for COunter INTELligence PROgram), the secret operation run by the FBI during the days of J. Edgar Hoover where they engaged in all manner of covert activities such as infiltrating religious, civil rights, and anti-war movements and having their agents try to get those groups to engage in illegal actions that would discredit them and land the leaders in jail. While the groups strongly suspected the presence of FBI informants and provocateurs in their midst, they could not prove it and the FBI denied it.
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Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist about whom I have written many times before because he devises interesting experiments to test social values and behavior. He has done several experiments that looked at cheating and in the video below he talks about another one that seems to address the question that I posed two weeks ago about how openly unethical behavior at the top of the Trump administration might affect those lower down.
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