When loyalty to the Dear Leader takes precedence over everything else

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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Meet the (great-great-great-…-grand) parents

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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The return of COINTELPRO

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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Corruption experiment

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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Never believe the first news reports about terrorist attacks

One of my firm rules-of-thumb is to never, ever believe the first reports that emerge from a chaotic situation like a mass shooting or other attack. Authorities often use the fact that the public fixates on the first report to promote initial false news to serve their agenda, knowing that many fewer people pay attention to the later corrections. Other people seize upon wrong information and run with it to create wild scenarios.
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Boy Scouts to accept transgender children

In order to take a break from all the bad news coming out of the Trump administration, I thought a piece of good news would help so here is an item about the Boy Scouts of America deciding to allow transgender children into their programs.

The Boy Scouts of America announced Monday that it will allow transgender children who identify as boys to enroll in its boys only programs.

The organization said it had made the decision to begin basing enrollment in its boys-only programs on the gender a child or parent lists on the application to become a scout. The Boy Scouts had previously held a policy that relied on the gender listed on a child’s birth certificate for those programs.

The organization’s leadership had considered a recent case in Secaucus, New Jersey, where an 8-year-old transgender child had been asked to leave his Scout troop after parents and leaders found out he is transgender. But the statement issued Monday said the change was made because of the larger conversation about gender identity going on around the country.
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Trump World

We have entered a period in which democracy, with all that it connotes about respect for the rule of law and human rights, and that had been in decline in the US for some time, has rapidly degenerated, the label now merely a veneer slapped on an emerging autocracy. I share with commenter Smokey the concern that some of the things that I post under the category of humor are really quite terrifying. But I decided to go with the intent of the creator and if that person is a humorist, then humor it is.
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