What will happen when Trump gets bored?

Alfie Kohn’s description of Donald Trump as a narcissistic, boasting, lying, preening, swaggering, thin-skinned, petulant, desperately competitive, vindictive person with the “attention span of a toddler” who is lacking in “shame, humility, empathy, or capacity for reflection and self-scrutiny” and also “lacking not only in knowledge but in curiosity” was, I thought, a pretty succinct and accurate description.
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The emerging multipolar world

The president of Mexico has canceled a trip to the US next week to meet with Donald Trump after he said that Mexico was not going to pay for the wall, following which Trump said that there was no point him coming for the meeting if he was not going to pay. This cancellation was entirely predictable and the first sign that the US is going to be steadily alienating nations that were once its allies.
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Rat becomes president

The comic strip Pearls Before Swine is not usually overtly political, preferring to cast a wry eye at society’s mores in general. But in the last week it has been more targeted in which the obnoxious Rat gets sworn in as president, starting with the strip last Wednesday. The creator has continued that story arc on and off for the next week that you can see online, such as this one from Tuesday.
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Blog anniversary

Today is the 12th anniversary of my beginning to blog, starting at first on a platform provided by my university before moving in 2012 to Freethought Blogs. It has been a very rewarding experience for me. I have made the online acquaintance of many highly knowledgeable, insightful, funny, and thoughtful people among those who have read and commented.

Thanks to all very much for providing the stimulus to write. I feel that I have become a better (and quicker) writer because of the constant writing and editing and feedback.

The collision between the Trump fantasy world and the free speech rights of government employees

Donald Trump has only the sketchiest relationship with truth. He lies repeatedly and brazenly and in the face of easily available and widely known counter-evidence. This habit was no doubt enhanced by a life in business where he was surrounded by sycophants. One question of academic interest is whether he knows he is lying when he lies or whether he lives in a world where fantasy and reality blend seamlessly. In this age where any crackpot point of view can be found on the internet, TV, and radio, anyone can say “I have heard …” or “I have seen …” or “People say …” in support of their views, confirmation bias can be immensely powerful in that even the slightest indication of support for his views, however unfounded, is seen by him as conclusive.
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The Beatles sing Hey Jude

I came across this clip that I had never seen before of a quasi-live performance of the Beatles singing Hey Jude in 1968 as part of a video promotion for the song. The clip first aired on a show hosted by David Frost that begins with them goofing around and ends with the studio audience of 300 people crowding around the group to join in the famous ending. According the person who uploaded the clip, the performance was a mixture of live and lip-synching.
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The strange lives of internet memes: Pepe the Frog

There are some passing obscure references that I come across while surfing the web for news that I find curious but not intriguing enough to investigate until at some point the damn thing becomes so ubiquitous and annoying that I feel compelled to find out what the hell is going on. So it is with this ‘Pepe the Frog’ meme. It is a green frog that has started being associated with anti-Semitic and other racist tropes. This article describes how it became transformed from a benign, non-political, playful image to being associated with hateful message.
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Categorizing the ‘nones’ and why their numbers are rising

The rise in the number of people who self-identify as not being affiliated with any religion, popularly referred to as ‘nones’, is now a well-reported story. Richard Flory has been researching this phenomenon and has written an article based on his findings and says that the reasons for the rise are more complex than just the increasing secularization of society.
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