Make no mistake: The Trump administration is at war against science. It has stripped science advisors out of every agency, making sure that the federal government doesn’t make decisions based on evidence.
A note to science teachers: Read the following articles and remember that it is on you to build respect for science and for evidence alive for future generations.
Alan Singer details a long list of specific actions taken by the Trump regime to squelch science in the realm of climate change and public health in this post.
He writes:
“Our house is on fire” and the Trump Administration war on science is fanning the flames. In 2019, Donald Trump continued his war against science, public health, the environment and climate awareness On November 4, 2019, two years after Trump announced his intentions, the United States began the official process of withdrawing from 2015 Paris Climate Accord. In September, when sixteen-year old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg delivered an impassioned speech at the United Nations demanding climate action, Trump dismissed her on his twitter account. He cyber-bullied her again after she spoke at a U.N. Climate Action Summit in December.
While withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord was definitely Trump’s most publicized and probably most dastardly attack on the world’s future, his administration and his twitter account also attacked science and environmental safety in the United States during 2019 through smaller, lesser known, but damaging claims and decisions. These are documented on the website Silencing Science Tracker, a joint initiative of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund and at other sources. What follows are some of the Trump Administration low points from 2019 in chronological order. It is a very long list and very frightening.
The New York Times published a long article about the administration’s efforts to eliminate science in every agency where it matters.
Reporters Brad Plumer and Coral Davenport begin their comprehensive story:
In just three years, the Trump administration has diminished the role of science in federal policymaking while halting or disrupting research projects nationwide, marking a transformation of the federal government whose effects, experts say, could reverberate for years.
Political appointees have shut down government studies, reduced the influence of scientists over regulatory decisions and in some cases pressured researchers not to speak publicly. The administration has particularly challenged scientific findings related to the environment and public health opposed by industries such as oil drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research around human-caused climate change, which President Trump has dismissed despite a global scientific consensus.
But the erosion of science reaches well beyond the environment and climate: In San Francisco, a study of the effects of chemicals on pregnant women has stalled after federal funding abruptly ended. In Washington, D.C., a scientific committee that provided expertise in defending against invasive insects has been disbanded. In Kansas City, Mo., the hasty relocation of two agricultural agencies that fund crop science and study the economics of farming has led to an exodus of employees and delayed hundreds of millions of dollars in research.
“The disregard for expertise in the federal government is worse than it’s ever been,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, which has tracked more than 200 reports of Trump administration efforts to restrict or misuse science since 2017. “It’s pervasive.”
Hundreds of scientists, many of whom say they are dismayed at seeing their work undone, are departing.
Among them is Matthew Davis, a biologist whose research on the health risks of mercury to children underpinned the first rules cutting mercury emissions from coal power plants. But last year, with a new baby of his own, he was asked to help support a rollback of those same rules. “I am now part of defending this darker, dirtier future,” he said.
This year, after a decade at the Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. Davis left.
“Regulations come and go, but the thinning out of scientific capacity in the government will take a long time to get back,” said Joel Clement, a former top climate-policy expert at the Interior Department who quit in 2017 after being reassigned to a job collecting oil and gas royalties. He is now at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group.
Mr. Trump has consistently said that government regulations have stifled businesses and thwarted some of the administration’s core goals, such as increasing fossil-fuel production. Many of the starkest confrontations with federal scientists have involved issues like environmental oversight and energy extraction — areas where industry groups have argued that regulators have gone too far in the past.
“Businesses are finally being freed of Washington’s overreach, and the American economy is flourishing as a result,” a White House statement said last year. Asked about the role of science in policymaking, officials from the White House declined to comment on the record.
The administration’s efforts to cut certain research projects also reflect a longstanding conservative position that some scientific work can be performed cost-effectively by the private sector, and taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to foot the bill. “Eliminating wasteful spending, some of which has nothing to do with studying the science at all, is smart management, not an attack on science,” two analysts at the conservative Heritage Foundation wrote in 2017 of the administration’s proposals to eliminate various climate change and clean energy programs.
In some cases, the administration’s efforts to roll back government science have been thwarted. Each year, Mr. Trump has proposed sweeping budget cuts at a variety of federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. But Congress has the final say over budget levels and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have rejected the cuts.
For instance, in supporting funding for the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, recently said, “it allows us to take advantage of the United States’ secret weapon, our extraordinary capacity for basic research.”
As a result, many science programs continue to thrive, including space exploration at NASA and medical research at the National Institutes of Health, where the budget has increased more than 12 percent since Mr. Trump took office and where researchers continue to make advances in areas like molecular biology and genetics.
Nevertheless, in other areas, the administration has managed to chip away at federal science.
At the E.P.A., for instance, staffing has fallen to its lowest levels in at least a decade. More than two-thirds of respondents to a survey of federal scientists across 16 agencies said that hiring freezes and departures made it harder to conduct scientific work. And in June, the White House ordered agencies to cut by one-third the number of federal advisory boards that provide technical advice.
The White House said it aimed to eliminate committees that were no longer necessary. Panels cut so far had focused on issuesincluding invasive species and electric grid innovation.
At a time when the United States is pulling back from world leadership in other areas like human rights or diplomatic accords, experts warn that the retreat from science is no less significant. Many of the achievements of the past century that helped make the United States an envied global power, including gains in life expectancy, lowered air pollution and increased farm productivity are the result of the kinds of government research now under pressure.
“When we decapitate the government’s ability to use science in a professional way, that increases the risk that we start making bad decisions, that we start missing new public health risks,” said Wendy E. Wagner, a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the use of science by policymakers.
Skirmishes over the use of science in making policy occur in all administrations: Industries routinely push back against health studies that could justify stricter pollution rules, for example. And scientists often gripe about inadequate budgets for their work. But many experts say that current efforts to challenge research findings go well beyond what has been done previously.
In an article published in the journal Science last year, Ms. Wagner wrote that some of the Trump administration’s moves, like a policy to restrict certain academics from the E.P.A.’s Science Advisory Board or the proposal to limit the types of research that can be considered by environmental regulators, “mark a sharp departure with the past.” Rather than isolated battles between political officials and career experts, she said, these moves are an attempt to legally constrain how federal agencies use science in the first place.
Some clashes with scientists have sparked public backlash, as when Trump officials pressured the nation’s weather forecasting agency to support the president’s erroneous assertion this year that Hurricane Dorian threatened Alabama.
But others have garnered little notice despite their significance.
This year, for instance, the National Park Service’s principal climate change scientist, Patrick Gonzalez, received a “cease and desist” letter from supervisors after testifying to Congress about the risks that global warming posed to national parks.
“I saw it as attempted intimidation,” said Dr. Gonzalez, who added that he was speaking in his capacity as an associate adjunct professor at the University California, Berkeley, a position he also holds. “It’s interference with science and hinders our work.”
Curtailing Scientific Programs
Even though Congress hasn’t gone along with Mr. Trump’s proposals for budget cuts at scientific agencies, the administration has still found ways to advance its goals.
One strategy: eliminate individual research projects not explicitly protected by Congress.
For example, just months after Mr. Trump’s election, the Commerce Department disbanded a 15-person scientific committee that had explored how to make National Climate Assessments, the congressionally mandated studies of the risks of climate change, more useful to local officials. It also closed its Office of the Chief Economist, which for decades had conducted wide-ranging research on topics like the economic effects of natural disasters. Similarly, the Interior Department has withdrawn funding for its Landscape Conservation Cooperatives, 22 regional research centers that tackled issues like habitat loss and wildfire management. While California and Alaska used state money to keep their centers open, 16 of 22 remain in limbo.
A Commerce Department official said the climate committee it discontinued had not produced a report, and highlighted other efforts to promote science, such as a major upgrade of the nation’s weather models.
An Interior Department official said the agency’s decisions “are solely based on the facts and grounded in the law,” and that the agency would continue to pursue other partnerships to advance conservation science.
Research that potentially posed an obstacle to Mr. Trump’s promise to expand fossil-fuel production was halted, too. In 2017, Interior officials canceled a $1 million study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the health risks of “mountaintop removal” coal mining in places like West Virginia.
Mountaintop removal is as dramatic as it sounds — a hillside is blasted with explosives and the remains are excavated — but the health consequences still aren’t fully understood. The process can kick up coal dust and send heavy metals into waterways, and a number of studies have suggested links to health problems like kidney disease and birth defects.
“The industry was pushing back on these studies,” said Joseph Pizarchik, an Obama-era mining regulator who commissioned the now-defunct study. “We didn’t know what the answer would be,” he said, “but we needed to know: Was the government permitting coal mining that was poisoning people, or not?”
While coal mining has declined in recent years, satellite data showsthat at least 60 square miles in Appalachia have been newly mined since 2016. “The study is still as important today as it was five years ago,” Mr. Pizarchik said.
The Cost of Lost Research
The cuts can add up to significant research setbacks.
For years, the E.P.A. and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences had jointly funded 13 children’s health centers nationwide that studied, among other things, the effects of pollution on children’s development. This year, the E.P.A. ended its funding.
At the University of California, San Francisco, one such center has been studying how industrial chemicals such as flame retardants in furniture could affect placenta and fetal development. Key aspects of the research have now stopped.
“The longer we go without funding, the harder it is to start that research back up,” said Tracey Woodruff, who directs the center.
In a statement, the E.P.A. said it anticipated future opportunities to fund children’s health research.
At the Department of Agriculture, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced in June he would relocate two key research agencies to Kansas City from Washington: The National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a scientific agency that funds university research on topics like how to breed cattle and corn that can better tolerate drought conditions, and the Economic Research Service, whose economists produce studies for policymakers on farming trends, trade and rural America.
Nearly 600 employees had less than four months to decide whether to uproot and move. Most couldn’t or wouldn’t, and two-thirds of those facing transfer left their jobs.
In August, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, appeared to celebrate the departures.
“It’s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker,” he said in videotaped remarks at a Republican Party gala in South Carolina. “But by simply saying to people, ‘You know what, we’re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven of Washington, D.C., and move you out in the real part of the country,’ and they quit. What a wonderful way to sort of streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.”
The White House declined to comment on Mr. Mulvaney’s speech.
The exodus has led to upheaval.
At the Economic Research Service, dozens of planned studies into topics like dairy industry consolidation and pesticide use have been delayed or disrupted. “You can name any topic in agriculture and we’ve lost an expert,” said Laura Dodson, an economist and acting vice president of the union representing agency employees.
We live in an era where ignorance and stupidity are valued more than evidence and scientific inquiry.
If this continues, our society will go backwards, and our climate–the air we breathe, the water we drink, the oceans and the climate that sustains life–will be jeopardized.
We are an endangered species, endangered by ignorance.
The Place Where Three Wars Meet
NGSS is doing Trump’s work for him by substituting confusing, boring “inquiry” for a solid foundation of scientific knowledge.
If the Russians or Chinese wanted to sabotage science education in the US, they could do no worse than NGSS. The “new” and “improved” Next Generation Science Standards a simply a reprise of decades old, debunked and failed methodologies wrapped in a shiny new jargon package. Common Core advocates were not content with ruining ELA and math instruction, so they decided to use the same wrecking ball on science instruction. the only saving grace is that only 19 states foolishly signed on to disrupt and discredit traditional and successful science programs. California. New York and 17 other states have signed the death warrant for content knowledge in science.
In Philosophy-Of-Science-Speak, inquiry is just another word for scientific method, but it gets around Feyerabendian issues of how much “method” there is to it.
Under NGSS, the traditional scientific method for conducting controlled experiments is on its death bed. The authors apparently found this to be too rigid, inaccurately reflecting the variety of different methods that real scientists use to do real science. The logic of using comparative measurements to isolate the effect of only one manipulated variable is now deemed to be too confining for children who are novice learners. So NGSS insists on conflating the ways that highly educated, professional scientists do science, with the best ways for children to acquire the content and procedural knowledge required to do science. Trying to turn novice learners into “pretend scientists” without the requisite working knowledge is a recipe for boredom, frustration, and rejection.
@Rage. My school district is one of the 17 adoptees of the NGSS, but I can tell you that the science standards we had previously were pretty darn awful, too. NGSS just made them worse. When our system took that RTtT money, we full on adopted CCSS (and we still have those standards) and our science classes suffered. A kid graduating out of our “World Class” school system likely wouldn’t be able to make the grade in a Community College science class/lab because they have very little science knowledge. It’s alarming that these kids want to be MD’s , BioChemists, Architects etc…and they have very little science knowledge or skills.
Welcome to Club NGSS. You make an excellent point regarding the expulsion of science (among other subjects) in favor of the CC math and ELA testathon (courtesy of RttT). From no science to really bad (Next Gen) science is a roadmap for disaster. If you think the standards are bad, wait until you see the science assessments that they spawn. For kids who typically enjoyed traditional science, the NGSS turn-off will be transformational, in a very bad way.
@Rage….my 1st got grandfathered in when it came to all the tests, but her GT science classes in HS (and MS) have been/were devoid of materials. No chemicals in GT chemistry class, no frogs or cow’s hearts for dissection in GT Bio class. She essentially gave up anything science related in favor of music/video and journalistic writing. In order to give child #2 half a chance, we moved him into private HS……fully stocked chemistry labs where they boil , burn and and fire up the bunsen burners regularly, dissection and microscopes in bio, and plenty of experiments in the physics lab and forensics lab (future classes for him). Our district sits kids in front of a computer to do science labs…it’s pretty dreadful. I live outside of DC (in MD) and we have adopted every single piece of bad deform that the stink tanks push out.
Great piece, Jon!!!
“All right,” the scientist shouted. “If you know better, where is your evidence? Let’s see your data.”
“Evidence, to god-damned hell with evidence! We have no evidence. In fact, we don’t need evidence. I don’t have to show you any stinking evidence, you god-damned scientist.
Vlad’s Agent Orange, Moscow’s Agent Governing America (MAGA) has his portfolio: it’s disruption. Disruption of U.S. political norms, of the U.S. environment, of U.S. alliances. He’s there to drive wedges and screw up the works. Here’s the history:
In 1987, real estate developer Trump flew to Moscow at the invitation of the Russian Ambassador on a KGB plane for an all-expenses paid trip. You know, the sort of thing that happens to U.S. businessmen all the time. LOL.
Trump married not one but two Soviet-block-born women. Honey traps?
An ignorant, incompetent playboy, Trump ran through the three quarters of a billion he inherited from his father. But then he went to Moscow again. Suddenly, oligarchs connected to Putin started showing up all over the world with suitcases full of cash to buy Trump properties. One of the Trump sons bragged to reporters about how the Trump organization was rolling in Russian money. And after Trump’s bankruptcies, no American bank would touch him. However, Deutsche Bank, with its billions in deposits from Russian oligarchs, loaned the bankrupt Trump half a billion dollars. His failed business career is saved.
So, Trump announced a bid for the Presidency. The Russian foreign intelligence services spent enormously and commit enormous resources in terms of personnel to a social media disinformation campaign to ensure that Trump was elected. Because, of course, Russia would do this for any politician. LOL. They’re just nice that way.
A lifelong British intelligence official wrote a report saying that Trump has deep ties to the Russians and that the Russians have kompromat on Trump in the form of a videotape involving hookers and golden showers in a Moscow hotel.
During the election, Trump repeatedly denied that he had any business in Moscow. At the very time he was saying this, he was negotiating to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Various reports suggest that Trump did not intend to win, in fact, but believed that the PR from the Presidential bid would secure the Moscow deal.
During the election, Trump actually publicly called upon the Russian government to hack his opponent’s email. They oblige. Treason in plain sight.
After the election, Trump delivered whatever Putin wanted. He met with Putin and held a press conference in which, in contradiction to American intelligence, he said that Putin told him he had nothing to do with the social media disinformation campaign, and Trump said that he believed him. LOL.Trump told staffers on multiple occasions that the U.S. should withdraw from NATO. Trump alienated all of our allies. He threatened to withdraw U.S. forces around the world unless other countries started footing the bill. He abandoned our allies, the Kurds, in Syria, leaving Syria to the Russians. At a time when Russia had announced that it had developed hypersonic nuclear missiles, he withdrew the United States from the INF, which limited nuclear weapons, and from the Open Skies Treaty, which allowed the U.S. and Russia to fly over one another’s territories to inspect compliance with nuclear and chemical weapons treaties.
Trump disrupted everything. He fomented racial division. He trumpeted Putin-style nationalism and autocracy. He appointed to head up every department and agency of the U.S. government a person dedicated to undermining the mission of that agency or department. In other words, he rendered the government completely dysfunctional. He created what former Bush, Jr. speechwriter David Frum called “the most dysfunctional White House in history.” His own former high-level staff refered to Trump as “a ***ing moron” (Tillerson) with “the understanding of a fifth- or sixth-grader” (Mattis). This worked very much to the favor of enemies of the United States, of course–having someone who doesn’t know what happened at Pearl Harbor or that Alabama isn’t on the coast in the path of hurricanes or that India does have a long border with China or why NATO was formed or why we have bases around the world in charge of the country. Someone who tweets major changes in defense policy at 2:00 in the morning.
Mueller wrote a report saying that a) if the evidence exonerated Trump from obstructing the Russia probe, he would so state; b) that he is NOT so stating; and c) that it’s up to the Congress, not the Justice Department, to take action on this, under U.S. law. Trump’s Attorney General stated that the report exonerated Trump, in direct contradiction of the report. One assumes that the Attorney General can read, so this is very, very odd.
Russia is conducting a war with Ukraine. Trump threatened to withhold military aid from Ukraine unless that country announced an investigation of Trump’s political opponent.
Trump’s allies in the Senate–McConnell, Graham, and Rubio, for example–just happen to be getting enormous contributions to their Political Action Committees from oligarchs close to Putin.
Trump and his people denied knowing Lev Parnas or having anything to do with him, even though there are tons of pictures of them together at events.
Just part of the story.
And this all adds up to . . . it’s all fake news. LOL. All this history. Just coincidence and libtard kookiness. Lord help us. Are we really that dumb?
If there is anyone in the U.S. intelligence services who still thinks that Trump is not owned by Russia, then the word “intelligence” should not be used of him or her.
This is doubtless the most disturbing and consequential intelligence coup in history.
And all of this is in plain sight–in news reports in The Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Vanity Fair, Politico, etc. All detailed by U.S. reporters.
Where are our intelligence services? Why is this guy still in office? What the heck is going on here? It all smells to high heaven.
I’m not a particularly political person. But I read the newspapers. And there is this clear, long-term, common thread. Why is this not obvious to everyone? Is there something I’m missing here?
I can just imagine Putin in the Kremlin, saying to his pals, “OK. Here’s an idea. Let’s give them Trump as their leader. LMAO! Can you imagine it? Trump, who thinks that climate change is weather and that Charles is “the Prince of Whales.”
Excellent synopsis.
It’s poorly written and full of typos and shifts in tense, but thank you.
And this guy, Trump, is supported by Evangelical Christians. Christians who claim their patriotism and allegiance to the teaching of Yeshua of Nazareth, who said, “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.” Luke 11:46, NIV
And, ofc, now that Starr and Dershowitz have joined Trump’s impeachment defense team, the Senate Trial might be renamed The Friends of Jeffrey Epstein Reunion Blowout.”
Maybe Trump will show up and bring Acosta with him, he and Ken and Alan and Alex can link arms and sing, “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.”
And as the Toxic Trumpy Dumpty Gang sings their theme song, they will be towing a dozen chained together teenage sex slaves behind them.
When the definitive history of this time is written, it should probably be called “In Plain Sight.”
I am reminded of Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter.” There its is, right there.
I wouldn’t expect Trump to know that the House has the right to impeach him, but Trump’s legal team should know better. They can’t dispute the charges because Trump is guilty. Why does Trump work so hard to keep knowledgeable people from testifying? It’s perfectly legitimate to ask foreign powers to help a US president get elected. Putin and the Russians also did nothing wrong. Trump believes Putin over our intelligence agencies. [Something is rotten and it’s Trump and his sycophants.]
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Trump Legal Team Denies Impeachment Charges in First Official Response
In a six-page letter formally responding to the impeachment charges, President Trump’s lawyers rejected the case against him as illegitimate and called the effort to remove him dangerous.
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s legal defense team forcefully denied on Saturday that he abused his power by pressuring a foreign government to investigate his political rivals, calling the two impeachment charges against him a “brazen and unlawful” attempt to hurt his chances of re-election.
The defiant rejection of the accusations came in response to an official summons issued last week by the Senate, notifying Mr. Trump that he faces removal from office if he is convicted. In a six-page letter, Mr. Trump’s first formal response to the charges against him, his lawyers denounced the impeachment case brought by House Democrats as constitutionally and legally invalid, and driven by malice toward him.
“The articles of impeachment submitted by House Democrats are a dangerous attack on the right of the American people to freely choose their president,” the document says. “This is a brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election, now just months away.”
The president’s lawyers did not deny any of the core facts underlying Democrats’ charges, conceding what ample evidence has shown, that he withheld $391 million in aid from Ukraine and asked the country’s president to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter. But they said Mr. Trump broke no laws and was acting entirely appropriately and within his powers when he did so, echoing the president’s repeated protestations of his own innocence. They argued that Mr. Trump was not seeking political advantage, but working to root out corruption in Ukraine….
People don’t work hard to keep those whose testimony will exonerate them from testifying. Trump’s a crook and a traitor. EVERYONE KNOWS THIS, on both sides. You know it. I know it. The Repugnican Senators know it. His lawyers know it. Everybody knows.
This would be a very good time for people to read or reread the interrogation in Room 101 scene from 1984. The whole point is to be able to say what everyone knows to be false and to force people to treat it as true. THAT’S REAL POWER. That’s power of the absolute height of corruption, command, coercion, control.
Or read about the show trials in the USSR, where once powerful men confessed to crimes they did not commit.
Exactly!!!! A very good source for that:
Radzinsky, Edvard. Stalin: The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia’s Secret Archives. Random House/Anchor, 2011.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s like incredible,” –Your president and mine, at a crooked depth the likes of which we never thought we would see, somewhere near the end of the empire
There are rubes out there in Trumplandia who don’t know. But everyone in power does. EVERYONE. This, I think, is the shocking truth. We are witnessing corruption so pervasive, so complete, that it’s totally mind-boggling. Trump is a crook and a traitor and an idiot. And everybody knows this.
Watching Lev Parnas as he was interviewed byRachel Maddox, as he explained that “everyone knew” about the Ukraine plot to get an investigation of Biden, I suddenly realized that the leadership of the US is a criminal syndicate.
It’s truly breathtaking, isn’t it? Lord, how did we get to such a place?
As usual, the NY Times reporters dutifully report every point that the Trump legal team presents with absolutely no context. The NY Times does not want readers to learn anything except “two sides, both have good arguments, it’s just a partisan issue”. Facts don’t matter — what matters is that NYT reporters are stenographers of opinions and present those opinions as if they have the same weight as facts on the other side.
Every single article the NY Times has written about impeachment works the same way:
Two sides, both sides have very valid points, it’s just a partisan issue. Opinion or fact, what’s the diff? We’re NYT reporters and we show “both sides” and if one side is lying, it’s not our job to tell you. It’s our job to present “both sides” equally.
Facts don’t matter. If a Republican says that Trump has the absolute right to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, the NYT would dutifully report that and say that “partisan Democrats” disagree.
Michael D. Shear and Nicholas Fandos would then write a follow up interviewing their Republican sources about how all Republicans agree that Trump can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, with a quote from some Democrat who says he doesn’t have that right.
If those reporters covered politics in Hitler’s Germany, they’d be writing stories about how so many people agree Hitler has the absolute right to round up Jews and how other people disagree, and it’s just a “partisan” issue.
In fact, if Trump wins in 2020, I expect that will be exactly the kind of reporting we see.
The Praetorian Guard was like the U.S. Secret Service (for the protection of Emperors after the Roman Republic came to an end) in the Roman Empire and was responsible for murdering 13 of the Emperors they were responsible to protect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Roman_emperors_murdered_by_the_Praetorian_Guard
I wonder if the U.S. Secret Service details that are responsible for protecting the Toxic Orange Donald Dumpster know this history.
Lord forbid. Conviction in the Senate? Trial for his many crimes? Trial in the International Court of Criminal Justice for Crimes against Humanity at our Southern Border? Yes, absolutely. But this is far, far, far beyond the pale.
We have to get the Toxic Orange Sludge out of the White House before he “might” end up facing justice for his long list of crimes.
And, if Dumplestiltskin ends up in a cell, will he end up as Epstein did?
However, if the Toxic Dumpster is enabled by the GOP and he ends up with four more years followed by President for Life, then I think the modern-day Pretaroian Guard will have no choice but to fulfill their Oath of Office.
“I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
The word “President” does not appear in that Oath.
When “leaders” are lawless, this is all the more reason to insist on being a nation of laws.
A sign in a bookstore, somewhere, that I saw recently reads:
Please note: Post-apocalyptic Fiction has been moved to Current Affairs.
Must have been thinking of the apocalypse that is Trump’s Presidency.
In an attempt to obliterate anything from the Obama administration, the orange menace is downgrading school lunches from the standards than Michelle Obama had previously set. Students will be getting more pizza and fewer fruits and vegetables. He is also setting lower income amounts for food stamp eligibility. These changes amount to a war on the nation’s poorest and most vulnerable students.https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2019/10/27/school-lunch-free-trump-food-stamp/2457920001/
I think it’s deplorable what Trump is doing to SNAP and welfare eligibility, but It’s pretty hard to downgrade school lunches anymore than they are already down graded. I like Michelle Obama and her attempts to make school lunches healthier was a mission that was implemented very poorly and without attention to cost . I don’t know how long you have been retired, but when was the last time you were in a public school cafeteria? The food is the most dreadful stuff I have ever seen and the overflowing trashcans prove that the kids won’t eat this garbage. Brown salad fixings, overcooked veggies, fruit cocktail that looks weeks old, mealy apples, mystery meat that is hard to chew/swallow etc…It’s not doing the kids any good if they won’t eat it and it’s wasting money that is essentially thrown into the trash.
I retired eight years ago. The lunches were not great then either. Our lunch ladies did their best to make the food appetizing, and they never would have served wilted salad.
retired teacher,
Yes, kids threw away their lunches when it was non-healthy lunch mystery meat 40 years ago and they threw away their lunches before Michelle Obama worked to make them healthier. But that doesn’t mean that making the lunches healthier wasn’t a good thing. I know schools that really improved their lunches.
It’s not doing kids any good if you believe that all the schools that now serve unappetizing healthy lunches because of Michelle Obama used to serve appetizing unhealthy lunches that students devoured.
^^fyi, when I said “you believe”, I was using “you” in a generic sense, and not referring specifically to retired teacher. I know that is NOT what retired teacher believes.
Look at the photos of what school children are being fed in other countries. We are now going back to obesity in children because of poor quality food. This leads to having adults who have poor eating habits and the resulting health problems. Lack of healthcare and poor eating habits lead to all sorts of problems. Who cares? Certainly not the Trump administration. He gobbles up McDonalds, french fries, Doritos, choc. cake, Oreos. Here’s to his clogged arteries.
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Here’s how school lunch in the US stacks up against what’s served in the rest of the world
Feb 9, 2015,
It’s estimated that 30.6 million students in the US get their lunches in the school cafeteria versus bringing it from home. And that’s a problem: It’s been found that students who eat school lunches are at a higher risk for being an unhealthy weight.
While new standards are in place, schools have had a difficult timeputting the guidelines to use.
These problems drove Sweetgreen, the rapidly growing chain of salad restaurants that’s making a quite a buzz, to start its Sweetgreen in Schools initiative. “School cafeterias are one of the biggest areas of opportunity that exist in the battle against childhood obesity,” the group said.
https://www.businessinsider.com/school-lunches-in-the-us-compared-to-other-countries-2015-2
I sent an article showing a typical US school lunch. I have to say that that photo looked a lot better than some of the lunches kids got. Hopefully things haven’t gotten worse since I last saw a public school lunch being served.
Let me put the note from above a little differently:
Well, Kenneth Starr and Alan Dershowitz will be representing Jabba the Trump before the Senate. I guess they formed pretty close ties at Jeffrey Epstein’s.
The Senate trial can now be renamed the Friends of Jeffrey Epstein Reunion Blowout!
Perhaps Trump can show up at the trial in person and invite Acosta and Prince Andrew to tag along. He and Alex and Andy and Ken and Alan can all link arms and sing, “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!”
Never mind that the Forever Trumpers have gone on the conspiracy theory that it was a” hit” by the Clintons or someone within the Clinton Foundation that had Perv Jeffrey taken out. It seems that their own side had much more to lose if Perv Jeffrey lived? But one can never make the cultists see through the smoke and mirrors.
Bob,
Unfortunately, they can’t sing “the gangs all here” if only those you mentioned show up.
Epstein’s “little” black book was pretty thick.
Very, very long. But these guys were Epstein Gold Star Members! Perhaps Bill and Bill can join them.
They can always sing “the gang’s 1/1000 th here”
Only Ghislaine Maxwell knows for sure and she ain’t talking.
She ain’t no dummy.
Ms. Maxwell could sing a pretty tune if she wanted to. LOL. Talka bout upsetting the apple cart!
If she sang a tune, it would be the same one Epstein sang before he died: taps.
As I said, she ain’t no dummy.
Alan Singer: This is a truly outstanding piece of writing and research. Thank you. And thanks, Diane, for posting it.
The custodians of STEM education programs are those members of Congress who rejected many of Trumps budget cuts to STEM programming. I have included a link to a report that documents some of the proposed budget cuts.
I am not certain that the interest in federal funding for STEM has much to do with anything other than promoting entry into these fields as jobs that will help the economy. That is a pity, but learning anything for its own sake, as a matter of curiosity, a sparked imagination, or eagerness to learn has not recently (if ever) been supported in any federal policies for education.
https://www.aip.org/fyi/2019/fy20-appropriations-bills-stem-education
On a related matter, respect for expertise in education, EdWeek has reminded us that Rick Hess, Director of policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, an executive editor at Education Next, and self-described “conservative,” has just released his 2020 Edu-Scholar Rankings, a project he has been overseeing since 2010.
The 2020 ratings are for scholars who have a university affiliation and who exercised public influence during 2019. In Hess’s scheme, scholars are awarded points signifying their public influence based on entries in: Google Scholar, number of education books published, highest Amazon ratings for these, something called university “syllabus points,” mentions in newspapers, mentions in the Education Press, Web mentions, mentions in the Congressional Record, and a Kred score for online presence and influence, but only for having a Twitter handle with mentions, retweets, and replies. You can see the scoring process along with a list of scholars whom Hess enlisted for his project this year at https://www.educationnext.org/2019-rhsu-edu-scholar-public-influence-scoring-rubric/
Diane Ravitch is number 10 on Rick Hess’s 2020 influencer list (same rating as the prior year). This is no small achievement, especially when you consider that Diane’s blog with 34,624,796 hits does not count in Rick Hess’s rating scheme.
Moreover, her new book, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools is not yet published but is already making big news.
What you will not see in Rick Hess’s ratings are the forms of value reflected in Diane’s many honorary doctorates, awards from peers, and the scope of Diane’s work in education including especially her work as an activist in creating the Network for Public Education and in making this blog worth visiting even if she is on the road, in the air, on a boat, doing a book tour, or walking her dog. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2020/01/the_2020_rhsu_edu-scholar_public_influence_rankings.html
Laura, in the first few years of Hess’s rankings, I was usually #1 or #2 (Linda Darling-Hammond and I changed places), but then Rick changed the metrics on which he based the ratings, which had the effect of lowering my score. After he played with the metrics, I stopped caring what my ranking was.
I looked at the people whom Hess says he consulted on the ratings. That list looked like a study in conflicts of interest.
The ratings illustrate more than activities that Hess favors in rating university scholars. They also show the relative “productivity” and “publicity” attained by specific universities whose scholars Hess rates highly.
For example, Harvard has 22 scholars listed, Stanford has 17 but the vast University of California system has 27 scholars listed, about half from UCLA. Teachers College has10 scholars listed, NYU has nine.
And so it goes. Sad to say, I have found that some universities are using the internet to brag about these ratings, very much like schools brag about ratings in US News and World Reports.
For the Fordham funded study about self-discipline and Catholic schools (heavy disclaimers), the professor selected was from University of California- Santa Barbara (male).
These lists remind me of the ones that adolescents make on Internet threads of THE 100 GREATEST GUITARISTS EVER. So ridiculous.
For some reason, adolescents never debate the greatest player on my chosen instrument: clarinet.
I wonder why that is.
Maybe it’s because you can’t play clarinet behind your back.
Yeah, that’s gotta be it.
That’s not to say I have not tried
This guy may not be the greatest, but he is certainly up there, especially when it comes to playing behind the back
My life has been meaningless. I am not on Hess’s rankings. LMAO. Goodbye, cruel world! ROFLMAO!
Oh. Wait. I’m a teacher. I don’t matter. It’s so difficult to remember one’s place.
But fortunately, I live in a world that has Hess and Chetty and David Coleman and Angela Duckworth (and Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee and Mike Petrilli and John King and Hannah Skandera and John White and Jeb Bush and Campbell Brown and so many others) to ‘splain things to me. hee hee haa haaaaa oh stop it hurts omg haa ahhhhaaa hhhhaaaaaaa ho ho he o hee hee.
How lucky we are to have Professor Hess to provide us with a detailed map of THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING. I wonder if he also does Social Registers.
Hess wrote in Philanthropy Roundtable that the reformers should use money to get what they wanted in the university schools of education.
Is it surprising that his rankings would be hinky?
Laura, it is doubtless the case that you have more to offer on the subject of education than do a great many people on this list. Thank you for your interesting, insightful, often profound posts, for your keen analysis, and for your dogged tracking down of the facts. I have learned a great deal from you. And while I’m at it, thank you to my fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Schimizzi, from whom I learned more about teaching than from any education professor, though I had some great ones.
Trump’s top two impeachment attorneys are Cippione and Sekulow, from the religion-stacking of the courts sphere. Cippione was McGahn’s replacement in the WH.
And his old Epstein party buddies, Ken and Alan
Randi Weingarten, so close to CAP in 2016 (the list of amici briefs for Montana does not include one from CAP, an organization that claims to oppose vouchers), told reporters about Espinosa v. Montana, “The case would turn the separation of church and state on its head. It will basically change over 200 years of practice in the U.S. ” The US Conference of Catholic Bishops submitted an amicus brief for Espinosa to SCOTUS for consideration this term.
Do public school supporters still want to parse the evangelical and Catholic hierarchies out of the attacks on public education? The Massachusetts Catholic Conference identifies at its site, the religion-based prejudice against public schools.
Theocracy in plain sight.
Excellent commentary. The criminal syndicate is international and headed by Vlad. He’s installed Trump in the American leg of the operation. The same blueprint has been, is being, and will be used on all such democracies around the world. It’s no coincidence that phraseology like “fake news” and “deep state” are parroted by dictator wanna-bes everywhere to divide and rule.
Putin foments conflict in the U.S. but avoids pitting the major religions against each another because they are the alliance that elected Trump. The early indicator of the alliance is the Manhattan Declaration. A single interest of the Republican Party serves both the rich colonialists and evangelicals/Catholics- keeping the poor, poor. The rich can more easily exploit the poor for financial gain and poverty makes people more religious.
Five years ago, no one, except the plotters, would have predicted a major U.S. city without public schools.
I sincerely believe that New Orleans will be the one and only American city to lose all public schools. Read my book on the non-miracle of NOLA.
You don’t think Providence is next ?
It’s reasonable to surmise the threat to public school funding and/or its
existence as an embodiment of democracy comes from- (1) The politically influential Providence bishop (2) Gov. Raimondo and her hedge fund friends (3) the superintendent who Gina appointed, Catholic, Infante-Green (4) the tech foundations’ grant recipient professors at schools like Bloomberg’s Johns Hopkins (5) the Arnold-funded R.I. Innovative Policy Lab at Brown (6) Hanushek’s co-speaker at Summit Ohio, Brown University’s Impatient Optimist professor
(7) United Appeal (8) City Year, and (9) the two major, print and internet local news sources- Providence Journal and GoLocalProv.
Providence’s student population is ideal for predation, overwhelmingly poor and minority. If New Orlean’s hurricane had been Providence’s
Nor’easter, the city would likely have been first? Like Louisiana, Rhode Island is largely influenced by Catholicism.
(10) The most watched TV station in Providence is Sinclair owned.
(11) The R.I. Foundation (9-27-2019) boasted about 5 contemporary “R.I. Pioneers”. 2nd person out of the listed 5 is the director of an international charter school. Her promo’s have the usual verbiage, “succeeding in the 21st century”, “no more low expectations…”
She is attached to Brown’s Education Alliance and typical for those types of centers, there is no site tab listing funders. The “Pioneer” (in photo, appears white) touts that she is “regularly asked to serve on state education working groups”.
As a scientist, this is where we part ways. I am with the majority of the science community that understands the “science” behind climate change is in large part junk. Climate change science is a large money making business, nothing more, nothing less.
Can we affect our local environments? Yes. The globe? Please! If we could do what the altered, hockey-stick charts show, lets industrialized the moon and have a habitable atmosphere in a generation or two!
I dislike Trump to the point that I left the GOP after being a member of that party for 35+ years, but this is one area that he is spot on. Getting rid of the junk scientists out of the government is the best thing he has done.
Is there a cottage industry out there made from claims to dislike Trump followed by selling his propaganda?
on the nose
I believe 98% of the worlds scientists disagree with you.
Edic Ritter, self described “Cyclist, War-gamer, Crafter, Engineer, GEEK! and now stepping into the world of 3d printing”
And climate science denier. No problem, be happy.
I would like to know which features of climate science you think are “junk” and why you seem to believe there are no credible global changes that humans can or should try to address.
These climate change deniers are extraordinarily amusing. The mechanism behind climate change can be demonstrated with third-grade science experiments. LOL. No credible person thinks that this is some sort of vast conspiracy of the world’s scientists. Talk about kooky, fringe notions! These people always put forward this idea of the vast scientific conspiracy but ignore the fact that fossil fuel companies have big incentives to spend money on PR suggesting that there actually is a debate about this. They are aided by the fact that science is an inductive enterprise, and there is always room for debate at the margins.
But let’s suppose that there were a credible “debate” about the science (there isn’t). The precautionary principle alone would still dictate that we take dramatic action to reduce fossil fuels. Why? Well, a simple payoff matrix answers that question. The downside, if the fringe climate change denier are believed and turn out to be wrong, is catastrophic.
BTW, Koch industries paid a leading physicist, Richard A. Muller, to review the climate change science and debunk it. Muller is the author of the superb book Physics for Future Presidents–a great overview of available energy production methods and their relative costs. Muller was one of the few serious scientists who had some doubts about anthropogenic climate change. Here, his summary of what he concluded: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html
At the turn of the last century, there were a few scientists who still doubted the atomic hypothesis. And this doubt persisted at the fringe. And there are always “experts” willing to swear to anything as long as some very wealthy company–Exxon, for example–is writing big checks.
There are inhabited islands that are literally disappearing. Can’t be because sea levels are rising. Must be the weather. Any other ideas?
Scientist? Can you be more specific. Based on your comments I would guess that you are an astrologist?
Materials Engineer. I’ve developed materials used in such diverse industries as ballistics, aerospace, fire blocking and personal safety apparel. As an engineer, researcher and developer, I have been trained to be a critical thinker. There is nothing more disingenuous than fudging data.
If you have to add a “correction” factor to your climate change temperature data to prove your point, your data is a non-starter. If you set-up your surface temperature monitors in the concrete jungles of large cities and then point to them as increasing global temperature, your data is useless. Where is the next ice age we were threatened with in the 80’s? Explain the snow fall in Saudi Arabia, explain how is was warm enough in the 14th and 15th centuries to grow grapes in England, yet it’s way too cold to do so now.
I’m done arguing with people who won’t look at the facts. Your name calling and stating talking points and asking me to prove them wrong, when you haven’t offered any data to show they are true is exactly the same tact used by Trump, a very small-minded man that does not belong in the office he has found himself occupying.
Lastly, I am hopeful that we can all get along enough to gain our common goal of not seeing four more years of Trump.
Even “IF” Climate Change was a hoax, I still want clean air, clean water, and clean soil to grow safe food to eat.
We are not going to get that with CO2 emissions polluting our lungs, causing acid rain, and changing the Ph balance of the oceans and lakes threatening life in the oceans and lakes as we know it.
Agreed, as I said many times, pollution is local, and we should and can clean up our local environment. However “climate change” is nothing more that a money grab designed to cripple capitalism. Hope you’re warm during this super chilled winter (oh where is our global warming now!)
Since when is Trump is concerned about corruption and fiscal management? He detests brown people and the fact that Puerto Ricans are Americans doesn’t enter the picture.
“changing environmental conditions’ is acceptable language but climate change isn’t. This makes sense in Trump’s world. Why are conservative states asking for money? They all know that theres is NO climate change. Roads that are now under water because of ice melting…no problem. Flooding, fires, increases in destruction by the weather…no problem. Idaho, at one point, had 200 fires going at the same time. No problem.
Islands that are now uninhabitable because of continued sea level rise…no problem. Eric says it doesn’t exist. If it doesn’t exist, it isn’t a problem.
…………………………..
Conservative States Seek Billions to Brace for Disaster. (Just Don’t Call It Climate Change.)
A Trump administration program to help states prepare for natural disasters has become a window into the tortured political language of talking about climate change.
…Half the money, $8.3 billion, was set aside for Puerto Rico, as well as $774 million for the United States Virgin Islands. The Trump administration has delayed that funding, citing concerns over corruption and fiscal management….
Not every state has felt compelled to tiptoe around climate change. Florida’s proposal calls it “a key overarching challenge,” while North Carolina pledges to anticipate “how a changing climate, extreme events, ecological degradation and their cascading effects” will affect state residents.
The housing department has itself been careful about how it described the program’s goals. When HUD in August released the rules governing the money, it didn’t use the terms “climate change” and “global warming” but referred to “changing environmental conditions.”
Still, the rule required states that received money to describe their “current and future risks.” And when those risks included flooding — the most costly type of disaster nationwide — states were instructed to account for “continued sea level rise,” which is one consequence of global warming.
A spokeswoman for the housing department did not respond to requests for comment.
Global warming is real. That means climate change is real.
Air Pollution is real. That means climate change is real.
Water pollution is rea. that means climate change is real.
Soil pollution is real. That means climate change is real.
https://climatekids.nasa.gov/climate-change-evidence/
GFY
Lloyd,
Eric will explain away the increased volatility in weather that we are experiencing.
If the candidate running on the Democratic side isn’t a moderate right winger like Bloomberg or Buttigieg, Eric will vote for Trump, some irrelevant Republican or he won’t vote.
“Eric will explain away the increased volatility in weather that we are experiencing.”
That means he would have to ignore, with his head deep in a sandy hole (probably sand that is toxic thanks to an oil spill that washed ashore), what I said about “clean air, clean water, clean soil, the acidification of the oceans and lakes from CO2 and acid rain” that is an irrefutable result of using oil and coal to power our planet’s civilizations.
The increased volatility in weather has nothing to do with the other side of the environmental coin and that is the real issue. Global warming is a theory based on a mountain of evidence but scientists cannot prove that theory beyond a doubt even if all of the world’s countries except it while a minority of ignorant, loud-mouthed, brain hacked, faux Christians from the corrupt in every way Alt-Right, that are Americans, continue to pontificate that theory of global warming is a hoax.
Ocean acidification cannot be denied because that is a fact backed by hard science. IT is not a theory. Ocean acidification refers to a reduction in the pH of the ocean over an extended period of time, caused primarily by uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. … These changes in ocean chemistry can affect the behavior of non-calcifying organisms as well.
https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-coasts-education-resources/ocean-acidification
The results of air pollution
“Air pollution can also cause headaches, dizziness, and nausea. … Long-term health effects from air pollution include heart disease, lung cancer, and respiratory diseases such as emphysema. Air pollution can also cause long-term damage to people’s nerves, brain, kidneys, liver, and other organs.”
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/air-pollution/
“The main problem caused by water pollution is that it kills organisms that depend on these water bodies. Dead fish, crabs, birds and sea gulls, dolphins, and many other animals often wind up on beaches, killed by pollutants in their habitat (living environment).”
https://eschooltoday.com/pollution/water-pollution/effects-of-water-pollution.html
“Effects of Soil Pollution. Soil pollution can have a number of harmful effects on ecosystems and human, plants and animal health. … Soil pollution can also cause neuromuscular blockage as well as depression of the central nervous system, headaches, nausea, fatigue, eye irritation and skin rash.”
https://www.everythingconnects.org/soil-pollution.html
Every time I have confronted the Eric’s of this world with those irrefutable facts, they never respond. They fall silent, ignore my comment, and/or attempt to change the subject, or just vanish.
Lloyd Lofthouse: “Every time I have confronted the Eric’s of this world with those irrefutable facts, they never respond.”
My brother says that Al Gore pulled the biggest hoax on people. God controls the weather. I sent him some facts and, of course, he responded that they all came from ‘fake news’. REAL news comes from Fox, Hannity and Rush L. [I am supposed to listen to Hannity and Rush to learn something. Well, that never happened.]
…………………………………………………………….
RUSH: Now to the Climate Change Stack. I’ve been alluding to this, and here’s the value of this. You know, when you boil it down, folks, what is climate change? Climate change is a political issue. It is not scientific fact. It is not settled science. It requires them to say they have a “consensus of scientists” that agree that X = Y = Z. But in science there is no consensus because scientific reality is not up for a vote. Water is H2O. It’s not something else. The earth is round, it’s not flat, and if somebody thinks it’s flat and you put it up for a vote, it doesn’t mean that the earth is round because there’s a consensus of scientists who say so.
It’s round because it is and it has been established and proven scientifically. Well, climate change can’t be proven scientifically because the predictions of it say it will not happen for the next 30 to 40 years. It’s all computer models. There is no empirical data. There is none. These people don’t realize it but they tell us climate change is gonna happen the next 30 to 50 years, maybe even the end of this century. “That’s why we gotta get busy now trying to reduce our carbon footprint because it’s going to be bad!:”
And then we’ll have a heat wave and they’ll say, “See? See? Climate change!” Wait a minute. You said it’s not gonna happen for 20 or 30 years? What do you mean, ‘See? See?’” It’s nothing but politics. But here is the clincher. What is the blame? What is the cause? The scientific consensus that tries to make you and particularly your children believe that there is climate change, what is the cause? It is the advanced lifestyle of the United States of America that is directly to blame for climate change.
Oh, yes, it is. It’s our SUVs. It’s our industrialization.
It is the use of fossil fuels.
It is … progress.
Climate change is the fault of advanced civilizations, in their telling. They have to guilt somebody. They have to make somebody feel responsible so that they can make those people change their behavior and change the way they vote and change their position on issues. And the climate change crowd wants everybody voting liberal Democrat for expanding — never-ending expanding — government, massive tax increases, and restrictions in regulations on private sector businesses, because all of those things are responsible for the destruction of the planet!…
I wonder if Rush still calls his fans “ditto heads” and tells them not to worry because he will do their thinking for them.
Thanks for so eloquently encapsulating the war against science and the triumph of ignorance.
Ode to a Climate scientist
Your science is a joke
Your physics is a sham
It’s mirrors and it’s smoke
And candied apple ham
The climate is in flux
And will be ever more
You do it all for bucks
And really nothing more
It is less “ignorance” which prevails, than conscious evil. Trump and his ilk are fully aware of the consequences of their positions but disregard what Gore called “inconvenient truths” in Trump’s interest in undoing everything done by Obama and in maximizing corporate profits. He knows what he is doing.
Trump is a useful fool. He is so ignorant of so much that his misadministration provides an opportunity for rapacious, crooked Senators and Congresspeople to ram through, in the form of legislation or of Executive Orders, any policy that might benefit their large-dollar donors. If your client oligarch wants a policy in place that will clearly hurt people in general because it’s going to make him or her a lot richer, it really helps to have someone making the decisions who things that Belgium is a city, doesn’t know what happened at Pearl Harbor, doesn’t know that India has a border with China, thinks that when we impose tariffs, those are paid by the country whose goods we impose them on, etc. An ignorant fool is easily manipulated.
So useful is Trump’s ignorance to corrupt leaders in our country and in Russia and elsewhere, that they will overlook anything–his breathtaking ignorance, his criminal history, his treasonous relationship with Russia. EVERYONE, on both sides, knows that Trump is an idiot, a liar, a crook, and a traitor. Everyone. But some find it useful to pretend that none of this is so.
Leaders must be ignorant; they cannot cloud their thinking with a multitude of details. Those details may take away his confidence in his judgement, and he has to appear confident all the time.
“She” (the female leader) also has to appear confident at all times.
Margaret Thatcher is a perfect example of the supremely confident ignoramus.
To understand Trump, you must understand that he has no principles.
He doesn’t care about climate change.
He goes where his funders in the fossil fuel industry want him to go.
If someone offered his campaign $100million to be concerned about climate change, he would.
“There is a sucker born every minute”
The snowflakes gave me money
But I gave THEM the shaft
In Land of Milken Honey
The loyalty is daft
This reminds me of what the Tennessee governor did 3 years ago: he appointed businessmen to each of the boards of TN’s public universities. There is only one professor in each of these boards but for the board of the largest and best public college system, the University of Tennessee system, he disallowed profs.
Behind these events is the strong belief in leadership, and that the leaders don’t have to be experts in what they lead. Universities even teach separate courses in leadership and students can get a degree in leadership as if it was a separate profession.
Let’s face it, experts are a pain when a leader has an objective not supported by the expert opinion.
Wile E Coyote School of Leadership
No expertise required
To lead them off the edge
If leadership’s desired
It’s damaging to hedge
The main reason school lunches are “unhealthy” is because the fed buys dairy products and other processed foods that farmers and/or the food industry cannot sell and that makes it impossible to provide a healthy balanced meal.
For some reason, there was no URL for this article from the NYT. They admit that there is brazen corruption in the Trump administration. They are admitting that NOW is the time for stability, to be open to new ideas. [They still are not on board for Medicare for All. It’s too radical.]
………………………………..
THE DEMOCRATS’ BEST CHOICES FOR PRESIDENT
BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD…NYT
PUBLISHED JAN. 19, 2020
American voters must choose between three sharply divergent visions of the future.The incumbent president, Donald Trump, is clear about where he is guiding the Republican Party — white nativism at home and America First unilateralism abroad, brazen corruption, escalating culture wars, a judiciary stacked with ideologues and the veneration of a mythological past where the hierarchy in American society was defined and unchallenged….
There are legitimate questions about whether our democratic system is fundamentally broken. Our elections are getting less free and fair, Congress and the courts are increasingly partisan, foreign nations are flooding society with misinformation, a deluge of money flows through our politics. And the economic mobility that made the American dream possible is vanishing.Both the radical and the realist models warrant serious consideration. If there were ever a time to be open to new ideas, it is now. If there were ever a time to seek stability, now is it.That’s why we’re endorsing the most effective advocates for each approach. They are Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.
AT THE DAWN OF 2020, some of the most compelling ideas are not emerging from the center, but from the left wing of the Democratic Party. That’s a testament to the effectiveness of the case that Bernie Sanders and Senator Warren have made about what ails the country. We worry about ideological rigidity and overreach, and we’d certainly push back on specific policy proposals, like nationalizing health insurance or decriminalizing the border. But we are also struck by how much more effectively their messages have matched the moment…
Mr. Sanders would be 79 when he assumed office, and after an October heart attack, his health is a serious concern. Then, there’s how Mr. Sanders approaches politics. He boasts that compromise is anathema to him. Only his prescriptions can be the right ones, even though most are overly rigid, untested and divisive. He promises that once in office, a groundswell of support will emerge to push through his agenda. Three years into the Trump administration, we see little advantage to exchanging one over-promising, divisive figure in Washington for another.
Good news, then, that Elizabeth Warren has emerged as a standard-bearer for the Democratic left.Senator Warren is a gifted storyteller. She speaks elegantly of how the economic system is rigged against all but the wealthiest Americans, and of “our chance to rewrite the rules of power in our country,” as she put it in a speech last month. In her hands, that story has the passion of a convert, a longtime Republican from Oklahoma and a middle-class family, whose work studying economic realities left her increasingly worried about the future of the country. The word “rigged” feels less bombastic than rooted in an informed assessment of what the nation needs to do to reassert its historic ideals like fairness, generosity and equality.She is also committed to reforming the fundamental structures of government and the economy — her first commitment is to anti-corruption legislation, which is not only urgently needed but also has the potential to find bipartisan support. She speaksfluently about foreign policy, including how to improve NATO relations, something that will be badly needed after Mr. Trump leaves office.
Her campaign’s plans, in general, demonstrate a serious approach to policymaking that some of the other candidates lack. Ms. Warren accurately describes a lack of housing construction as the primary driver of the nation’s housing crisis, and she has proposed both increases in government funding for housing construction, and changes in regulatory policy to encourage local governments to allow more construction.She has plans to sharply increase federal investment in clean energy research and to wean the American economy from fossil fuels. She has described how she would reduce the economic and political power of large corporations and give workers more ability to bargain collectively. And she has proposed a sweeping expansion of government support for Americans at every stage of life, from universal child care to free public college to expanded Social Security…
She [Klobuchar] promises to put the country on the path — through huge investments in green infrastructure and legislation to lower emissions — to achieve 100 percent net-zero emissions no later than 2050. She pledges to cut childhood poverty in half in a decade by expanding the earned-income and child care tax credits. She also wants to expand food stamps and overhaul housing policy and has developed the field’s most detailed plan for treating addiction and mental illness. And this is all in addition to pushing for a robust public option in health care, free community college and a federal minimum wage of $15 an hour.
Ms. Klobuchar speaks about issues like climate change, the narrowing middle class, gun safety and trade with an empathy that connects to voters’ lived experiences, especially in the middle of the country. The senator talks, often with self-deprecating humor, about growing up the daughter of two union workers, her Uncle Dick’s deer stand, her father’s struggles with alcoholism and her Christian faith…
Yet, Mr. Trump maintains near-universal approval from his party and will nearly certainly coast to the nomination. Democrats would be smart to recognize that Mr. Trump’s vision for America’s future is shared by many millions of Americans.