Education and Focus

Posted on Monday 14 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Education is now the best predictor for how someone will vote;
  • Why Trump’s supporters don’t believe his threats (they’re focused only on their particular concerns);
  • How Trump wants to lie in real-time without being fact-checked;
  • Paul Krugman suggests that Trump’s lies are a mishmash result of being unmoored in time.

Is this a surprise?

CNN, 14 Oct 2024: Why education level has become the best predictor for how someone will vote

There are many ways in which Americans are ‘divided’ — women v men, rural v urban, whites v voters of color — in ways that are reflected in their political preferences, but for whatever reason education now seems better than the others for predicting peoples’ votes.

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The Enemy Within

Posted on Sunday 13 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump is ready to use the military against his “enemies from within”;
  • What one immigrant thinks when he hears Trump speak;
  • How Republicans are sure there will be cheating, and migrants will vote. Counter: why not let the whole world vote on the US presidential election?
  • Gateway Pundit admits lying; a MAGA woman explains how Alexa is part of the government’s control of hurricanes; how Fox knows it’s lying about immigrants and disaster aid.

Anything genuinely new today?

Well, yes. Trump is ready to call out the military against his enemies, such as “radical left lunatics,” presumably meaning anyone who doesn’t vote for him.

CNN, 13 Oct 2024: Trump suggests using military against ‘enemy from within’ on Election Day

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There’s Another Word For It

Posted on Saturday 12 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

I skim or glance at so many articles about politics every day, I’m surprised that I haven’t come across this phrase before, considering how this article suggests it’s been around a while. The word, or phrase, is “directionally correct,” and it’s another way to say “lying.”

Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley, 12 Oct 2024: The Wrong-Direction Election, subtitled “A brief history of a phrase the right uses to justify Trump’s BS.”

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Assault on and Rejection of Reality

Posted on Friday 11 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic on how things are much worse than a misinformation crisis;
  • Meteorologists notice that ignorance is becoming socially acceptable — but this has always been true, as C.P. Snow noted;
  • The Republican conspiracy theory that children who go to college are indoctrinated into liberal positions is belied by reality. It’s more that children who experience the world reject the ideologies of Republicans.
– – –

The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel, 10 Oct 2024: I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is, subtitled “What’s happening in America today is something darker than a misinformation crisis.”

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The Christian Authoritarian Agenda

Posted on Thursday 10 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Long before Project 2025, Christian conservatives have had an agenda to impose their values on everyone;
  • How some conservatives will call any evidence about the good economy fake news;
  • How MAGA disinformation can be deadly, but Trump’s followers would rather “spit on reality than admit liberals are right about something”

Long before Project 2025, it seems, an organization called the Alliance Defending Freedom has been working toward the same goals. (Of course, its use of the term “freedom” is a little like the use of “science” in “Christian Science.”)

Slate, Susan Rinkunas, 10 Oct 2024: Ban Abortion. End Gay Marriage. Outlaw Birth Control., subtitled “A powerful Christian conservative legal group is quietly reshaping America through the courts. Here’s what it’s after.”

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Skiffy Flix: The Day the Earth Stood Still

Posted on Wednesday 9 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Of all the 1950s science fiction films, this one is arguably the most profound, the least typical, and the most liberal. It involves an alien arriving on Earth, but he is not hostile, despite the knee-jerk fears of the military who thinks he must be something dangerous and to be destroyed. Ultimately it’s about humanity, and whether we can mature, overcoming our tribal differences, sufficiently to be worthy of membership into some kind of interstellar community. (Still, for all its high-mindedness, it is not without a few points of naivete about how things work. But they are pretty minor.)

[Draft. I’ll do another pass and fill in/correct details.]

Gist

A peaceful alien with a powerful robot companion comes to Earth to delivery a message: Earth needs to clean up its act, and join the galactic union, or face destruction.

Take

Perhaps the best of the 1950s science fiction, it challenges the notion that aliens are hostile and must be destroyed, and turns its attention to humans and human nature, and what it would take for humanity to join an alliance of other peaceful alien races.

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Consensus Reality Is Disappearing Before Our Eyes

Posted on Wednesday 9 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • No matter how dissociated from reality something a politician says is, there are people who will believe it.
  • People who think everything (such as Hurricanes) must happen for a reason are debating between God’s wrath and Deep State weather control;
  • The founder of Politifact reflects on the failure of fact-checking.
– – –

 

Slate, Jim Newell, 8 Oct 2024: This Does Not Bode Well for the Election, subtitled “The hurricane conspiracy theories spread by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are really bad, even beyond their obvious danger.”

Summarizing the situation since Helene, and the conspiracy theories that followed…
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For Certain Values of Truth

Posted on Tuesday 8 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

As one terrible Hurricane just passed through Florida and devastated North Carolina, and another potentially worse one is lining up to hit Florida’s Gulf Coast, here are some further reminders of conservatives’ views of climate change and other matters.

Here’s a convenient baseline. Vivek Ramaswamy has a new book out called, modestly, Truths: The Future of America First.

You can click the link and preview the book to see the table of contents, and some of the text. First chapter: “God Is Real.” (Which one? No point in asking.) “The Climate Change Agenda Is a Hoax.” (Is he quibbling with the word ‘agenda’?) And so on. The reader reviews extol him for providing all the answers! In simple language! Easy to read!

There are no reviews from reputable sources.

Let’s move on.

\\\

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Have There Always Been Crazies?

Posted on Monday 7 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How is it the Republican party is increasingly dominated by cranks and crackpots? Ideas from Robert Reich and Heather Cox Richardson, and examples from the debates, and about Hurricane Helene.
  • NYT is finally paying attention to Trump’s mental decline;
  • JD Vance and Lance Wallnau again, and the Pentacostals who believe in angels and demons.
– – –

Either the crazies have always been with us, and they just haven’t been as apparent as they now are through social media, or something has happened in the past few decades to turn the Republican party and its followers into… well…

Robert Reich, 7 Oct 2024: How did the GOP become the party of cranks and crackpots?

(The cartoon, widely circulated over the years, is credited to Randy Molton, 2015).

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October Heat Wave, and Dark Skies

Posted on Sunday 6 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

We’re a week or more into a heat wave in the Bay Area, and it’s at least the 6th day in a row the temperature here in Oakland has been above 90. Ever since last weekend the forecasters predicted the heat dying off in another day or two, yet it persists. Something weird going on out in the ocean, apparently.

Here’s what they were saying Tuesday:

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