Melissa McCarthy channels White House spokesperson Sean Spicer to demonstrate the nature of current press briefings. I for one am hoping that the relations between the government and the press get as hostile as possible because an adversarial press is more likely to produce actual news than one that had such good relations with high government officials that reporters could be easily manipulated and used as puppets.
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Donald Trump has made no secret of the fact that he thinks torture is a great idea and that it works in getting information from people, even though it is a war crime and the evidence suggests that any information generated by it is largely useless. He initially suggested that he wanted to reopen the so-called ‘black sites’, prions that were located overseas where prisoners could be tortured under the direction of the CIA, thus creating a slight distance from direct involvement in war crimes and providing a possible legal loophole.
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In my recent reviews of the rise and fall of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement (see here and here), I mentioned that the IDers were not young Earth creationists. They accepted almost all of the scientific conclusions regarding the age of the Earth and evolution. What they wanted was to overthrow the idea of both methodological and philosophical (or metaphysical) naturalism that they felt undermined the basis for belief in god.
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Alec Baldwin seems to be having a blast portraying Trump on Saturday Night Live. There have been increasing suggestions that Trump’s advisor Stephen Bannon is the person actually running the White House with Trump as his puppet and a figurehead. Given Trump’s ego, narcissism, and intense dislike of being upstaged, it will be interesting to see if this will get under Trump’s skin at some point and what he will do about it if it does.
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The Trump administration appealed for an emergency stay of the judge’s order halting the implementation of his Executive Orders on immigration and refugees but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected it.
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New information is emerging about what happened during the recent raid in Yemen by US military forces including the US Navy Seals that resulted in many civilians being killed, including women and children. These new reports were provided by survivors of the attacks.
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As I said in my post yesterday that looked at the moribund state of the ID movement these days, there was always a deep-rooted tension between the Intelligent Design (ID) group and young Earth creationists. The ID people were playing a long game. Their goal was to overthrow the principle of naturalism that governed scientific practice and which they felt ruled out any role for god. As I have said before, naturalism can be divided into methodological naturalism in which you look for natural causes and explanations for any phenomena, and philosophical naturalism, the idea that the material world governed by natural laws is all there is and thus a priori rules out any possibility of any kind of supernatural phenomena.
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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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