The California Fires and What They Reveal

Posted on Sunday 12 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The despicable Donald Trump ignorantly criticizes California politicians, rather than offering any sympathy for the victims of the recent fires;
  • How well-intentioned policies from decades ago are partly responsible for the fires;
  • How humans might be doomed by their own human nature;
  • Another Mel Gibson screed;
  • And my take on the real reason behind why so many people want to think evolution, or climate change, is false.
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What a despicable person.

NY Times, 12 Jan 2025: Trump Calls Officials Handling Los Angeles Wildfires ‘Incompetent’

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Clearly, We’re Seeing an Infestation of Alien Mind Parasites

Posted on Saturday 11 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

This infestation is growing. The symptoms include paranoia, megalomania, delusions, and the perception of demons and/or global conspirators around every corner. The interpretation of extraordinary events (that have rational causes that they do not believe in), but rather see as evidence of a paranoid, fantastical, irrational worldview.

Salon, Matthew Rozsa, 11 Jan 2025: Los Angeles wildfires have become perfect fuel for Trump and climate denial, subtitled “Misinformation is spreading rapidly as experts say climate change is the likely accelerant for California’s crisis”

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Bill Adair, BEYOND THE BIG LIE

Posted on Saturday 11 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy”
(Atria, Oct 2024, xxiii + 273pp, including 55pp of acknowledgements, sources, notes, and index.)

This is a recent book, just published in October, on a very timely subject. The author, I didn’t realize when I bought the book, created the PoliFact website, already my personal go-to source for fact-checking. The second phrase in the subtitle is what drew me in; do Republicans really lie more (though that’s certainly my impression), and if so, *why* do they lie more? Continue reading →

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Conservative Reactions to the Los Angeles Fires

Posted on Friday 10 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

The past few days have been fodder for examples of (conservative) lies, evasions, and misrepresentations, as they react to the fires in Southern California.

  • Conservatives blame the LA fires on the vast world-wide conspiracy theories they are obsessed with;
  • Two examples from Facebook about naive half-baked ideas about how the fires were a conspiracy, or could have been avoided;
  • NYT on how the intensity of these fires is actually (of course) the result of climate change, as well as bad urban planning decades ago;
  • Salon’s Amanda Marcotte on Fox News’ incoherent spin on the California fires;
  • Short items about how Trump lies, and the upside-down thinking of Newsmax;
  • And a quote from Bertrand Russell.
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We should have seen this one coming. Not the fires —  the conservative reactions. Especially about the one thing they seem most afraid of.

Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley, 9 Jan 2025: Elon Musk Endorses Alex Jones’ Claim That the Los Angeles Fires Were Set Intentionally, subtitled “Big if true.”

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So Predictable

Posted on Thursday 9 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trumps lies, or evades, or misrepresents;
  • Conservatives blame everyone they don’t like for the California wildfires;
  • Anita Bryant dies; she was an outlier in her time, but now typical of MAGA;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on the California fires;
  • How Jimmy Carter lost evangelical support for his anti-racism and support of gays;
  • How perhaps some US states should join Canada.
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CNN, 9 Jan 2025: Fact check: As wildfires rage, Trump lashes out with false claims about FEMA and California water policy

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A New Jack Smith Rule

Posted on Wednesday 8 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The southern California wildfires, and Will Rogers Ranch;
  • How conservatives blame people they don’t like for everything;
  • Perhaps I should create a new “Jack Smith” rule to dismiss claims by conservatives, since they always seem to be wrong;
  • Lagniappes about Trump, the Mercator Projection of the globe, and his admiration for Putin.

News today is dominated by the wildfires in the Los Angeles area, beginning with the one that broke out yesterday in Pacific Palisades, an area of canyons right along the coast and between Santa Monica and Malibu. That’s not too far from where my partner’s son and his wife live in West L.A., so we texted them to ask their status. They weren’t in an evacuation zone, but they evacuated anyway, driving some 45 miles to Brea, east of L.A., to stay at his mother’s place. We watched CNN news about the fires last night, and again this morning.

Having lived both in So- and NoCal all my life, I’m familiar with the perpetual threat of big fires. I’ve never been near enough to be threatened by one. But I remember, vaguely, the 1961 Bel Air fire, partly through my father’s photos, a couple of which are posted on this page of my family history.

I have found a place that has burned down in the Palisades fire that we knew in particular, because we took a hike there in our December 2023 trip to LA to see partner’s son and wife — via this — the Will Rogers Ranch. I mentioned the hike in my post about that trip. The WRR folks have already posted before and after pics of the ranch house.

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Conservative Reality, and Reality

Posted on Tuesday 7 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • The state of the American economy, vs. conservative dystopian fantasies;
  • How conservatives whitewash the events of January 6th, 2021;
  • How Meta is obeying in advance by removing fact-checkers, and wondering why conservatives object to fact-checkers (where the answer is obvious);
  • How the conservative notion of serving a higher cause excuses, in their minds, blatant lying, as with Mike Johnson’s recitation of a fake “Jefferson prayer”.
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The question keeps coming up, does it matter if human perceptions have little do with reality? Is there a problem if humans live by made-up stories even when they’re obviously untrue? At what point does this behavior so collide with reality that it will cause real harm?

First of all, an example, yet again, of how the economy that Biden is leaving behind is not as bad as most conservative voters think. They are either being disingenuous, or short-sighted. From yesterday’s print edition.

NY Times, news analysis by Peter Baker, 5 Jan 2025: Trump Sees the U.S. as a ‘Disaster.’ The Numbers Tell a Different Story., subtitled “President Biden is bequeathing his successor a nation that by many measures is in good shape, even if voters remain unconvinced.” [gift link]

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George Lakoff, THE POLITICAL MIND

Posted on Monday 6 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain”
(Viking, June 2008, 292pp, including 20pp of acknowledgements, notes, and index.)

Note that the paperback edition from 2009 changed the subtitle to “A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics”

This is a fascinating book on two opposite counts. Lakoff is a professor at UC Berkeley, and I became aware of him through newspaper columns and Facebook posts and mentions of him by David Brin. I bought this 2008 book belatedly in 2019 from a 3rd-party dealer, via Amazon, for $10(!), and have now gotten around to reading it.

Briefly, the two opposite counts: his take is about politics, from the perspective of what we’ve learned about the brain [mind] since the 18th century, and his understandings are precisely those gathered from studies of the mind, principally that humans don’t think rationally, as everyone but especially the economists used to think. This is not a new discovery, but what’s new here is how Lakoff applies this to modern politics. Continue reading →

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Faith, Consolation, Reality

Posted on Saturday 4 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

A couple weeks ago I noted, without any kind of deep analysis, a David Brooks essay about his experience of faith, and how it involved random emotional feelings of transcendence and nothing about perceiving the actual nature of reality.

OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, 3 Jan 2025: What David Brooks’s search for God can teach secularists, subtitled “Brooks’s essay is the kind that often exasperates nonbelievers. But is there something of value to secular civilization in his God-optional conclusions?”

Does he mean, is there some kind of rhetorical ploy that seculars can use to similarly appeal to peoples’ subjective senses of awe and meaning?

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Knee-Jerk Conservative Reactions

Posted on Friday 3 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Conservatives react to the incidents this past week in New Orleans and Las Vegas by blaming their favorite bogeymen. Immigrants! Diversity initiatives! Without evidence, or rationale.
  • As conservatives reject reality, reality-based scientists are rejecting the coming conservative administration, by moving overseas.
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All right, let’s see what the conservative loonies are up to this week. Conservatives just can’t help themselves. Whatever happens in the world — this past week, an ISIS-inspired truck driver in New Orleans, and a Cybertruck driver in Las Vegas — they’re sure their favorite bogeymen are to blame. (Without evidence.) Immigrants! Diversity initiatives! These people are motivated by mindless fear.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 3 Jan 2025: New year, same Trump: MAGA pounces on New Orleans tragedy to spread disinformation, subtitled “The president-elect’s barrage of lies encourages his followers to reject reality even harder”

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