‘Donald Trump is going down. His house of cards will collapse at some point. The leaks will keep flowing and eventually his position will become untenable. Conflicts of interest. Connections to Russia. All of it will become too great a weight to carry, especially since The Donald has very few genuine allies in Washington.

The Democrats want him gone. So too do most of the Republicans. Hell, they never wanted him to begin with. The GOP did everything it could to derail his candidacy, and only climbed aboard after Trump’s runaway train was the last red line careening towards the White House. So for now they’re playing nice with the former Democrat who eschews Conservative dogma in a variety of ways and is loyal to absolutely no one save himself. But when the moment comes, they’ll gladly trade Trump in for Mike Pence, a Conservative’s wet dream. For all these reasons, Trump may not make it to the finish line.

…Should the Democrats regain the House in 2018 the midterm elections, it seems all but certain that Trump will face impeachment. But even if Republicans maintain their control of the House, they may yet work behind the scenes to manifest a more informal regicide.

If things continue to deteriorate, Republicans may pressure Trump to resign. Perhaps he would cite health concerns to save face, claiming an endless string of supposed victories on his way out the door.

And if things degenerate to the point that even a sizeable share of Republican voters disavow Trump, then the GOP itself could begin impeachment proceedings should The Donald fail to heed. That scenario, which seems rather far fetched at the present, highly partisan moment, could become more viable should the revelations of Trump’s connections to Russia and Vladimir Putin become so clear that all rational voters can no longer deny them.

Under those circumstances, it would be vital for Republicans to get Trump out of office with enough time for Pence to assert himself as a legitimate incumbent for the 2020 election. Over a year should do it. By the time the 1976 election rolled around, Gerald Ford had spent two years as president after taking over for Nixon. It almost worked. He was able to fend off a challenge within the party from Ronald Regan, and probably would’ve beaten Jimmy Carter had he not hung himself with the albatross of pardoning Nixon in one of his first acts as president.

The Republicans will remember this. If they need to remove Trump from office because they risk going down in flames with him, then they will move quickly so that Pence can establish himself.

All in all, it seems some level of attempted political regicide against Donald Trump will emerge over the next four years. The details of course are impossible to predict. Whether it is the actual regicide that Nixon suffered, the near regicide that Clinton endured, or the far less successful attempts that everyone after Carter has witnessed, remains to be seen. At this point, we can’t even know if it will be out in the open or take place behind closed doors, or if it will be initiated and pushed by the Democrats or the Republicans. But something is probably in the offing.

The king will soon be dead. Long live the king…’

Source: Akim Reinhardt, 3quarksdaily

This is important. I am afraid we are in grave danger of dissipating our energy by simply coming out every weekend to march and chant. This is easily dismissed by The Orange One and his minions.

‘The esteemed Theda Skocpol lays out the lessons the Tea Party movement holds for the left today.’

Source: Democracy Journal

‘With a straightforward chemical tweak, the addictive—and often deadly—opioid painkiller, fentanyl, may transform into a safe, non-addictive, targeted therapy. Researchers reported this on Thursday in Science.

In rats, a chemically modified form of the opioid could only work on inflamed, hurting tissue—not the rest of the body. Plus, it wasn’t deadly at high doses, like the original, and it didn’t spur addiction-forming behavior in the rodents, researchers at Freie Universität Berlin reported.

“This yielded a novel opioid analgesic [pain reliever] of similar efficacy to conventional fentanyl, however, devoid of detrimental side effects,” the authors concluded.

For their chemical makeover, the researchers noted that when tissue is damaged and hurting, it becomes inflamed and more acidic. The pH drops from approximately 7.4—what’s seen in normal, healthy tissue—to between 5 and 7. Fentanyl can work regardless of the pH, so it’s active throughout the nervous system no matter what. But, if it was altered to only work at the lower pH, then it could target just the pain source at the peripheral nerves, the researchers hypothesized. And with no activity in the central nervous system, it would dodge opioid’s serious side-effects, including addiction and systemic responses that can be lethal during overdoses.

Using computer simulations, the researcher figured out how modify fentanyl so that it only worked in more acidic conditions. The resulting molecule is (±)-N-(3-fluoro-1-phenethylpiperidin-4-yl)-N-phenyl propionamide, or NFEPP for short. NFEPP has an added fluorine, which attracts protons and allows the drug to become active only in low pH.
In experiments with human cells, the researchers found that NFEPP could still activate the classic μ-opioid receptor in the nervous system—but only at low pH.

In experiments in rats with foot injuries, the drug dampened pain responses in just the foot that was injured. In rats given fentanyl, pain responses were dampened in all feet. Next, rats on either fentanyl or NFEPP, were given a drug that blocks opioids but can’t cross the blood-brain barrier. In rats on fentanyl, the opioid blocker partially reversed the pain-relieving effects of fentanyl—which makes sense because fentanyl can target opioid receptors in the brain. But, in rats given NFEPP, the opioid blocker totally reversed pain relief. This suggests that NFEPP’s effects weren’t due to any activity in the brain, rather they were due only to activity at the site of the injury…’

Source: Ars Technica

‘Recent research from Stanford University shows that up to 4 per cent of adults [sleepwalk]. In fact, sleepwalking is on the rise, in part due to increased use of pharmacologically based sleep aids – notably Ambien.

Often, the episodes are harmless. Sometimes, of course, sleepwalking is dangerous. Somnambulists are in an irrational state during which they could harm themselves or others…

Why do some enter into such a potentially harmful state during sleep? One answer comes from studies suggesting that ‘sleepwalking’ might not be an appropriate term for what is going on; rather, primitive brain regions involved in emotional response (in the limbic system) and complex motor activity (within the cortex) remain in ‘active’ states that are difficult to distinguish from wakefulness. Such activity is characterised by ‘alpha wave’ patterns detected during electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings. At the same time, regions in the frontal cortex and hippocampus that control rationality and memory remain essentially dormant and unable to carry out their typical functions, manifesting a ‘delta wave’ pattern seen during classic sleep. It’s as though sleepwalking results when the brain doesn’t completely transition from sleep to wakefulness – it’s essentially stuck in a sleep-wake limbo.

‘The rational part of the brain is in a sleep-like state and does not exert its normal control over the limbic system and the motor system,’ explains the Italian neuroscientist Lino Nobili, a sleep researcher at Niguarda Hospital in Milan. ‘So behaviour is regulated by a kind of archaic survival system like the one that is activated during fight-or-flight.’..

Scientists now agree that bouts of localised wakeful-like activity in motor-related areas and the limbic system can occur without concurrent sleepwalking. In fact, these areas have been shown to have low arousal thresholds for activation. Surprisingly, despite their association with sleepwalking, these low thresholds have been considered an adaptive trait – a boon to survival. Throughout most of our extensive ancestry, this trait may have been selected for its survival value.

‘During sleep, we can have an activation of the motor system, so although you are sleeping and not moving, the motor cortex can be in a wake-like state – ready to go,’ explains Nobili, who led the team that conducted the work. ‘If something really goes wrong and endangers you, you don’t need your frontal lobe’s rationality to escape. You need a motor system that is ready.’ In sleepwalking, however, this adaptive system has gone awry. ‘An external trigger that would normally produce a small arousal triggers a full-blown episode.’ …’

Source: Aeon Ideas

‘Did you know that the Trump administration almost went to war with Iran at the start of February? Perhaps you were distracted by Gen. Michael Flynn’s resignation as national security adviser or by President Trump’s online jihad against Nordstrom. Or maybe you missed the story because the New York Times bizarrely buried it in the midst of a long piece on the turmoil and chaos inside the National Security Council.

Defense Secretary James Mattis, according to the paper, had wanted the U.S. Navy to “intercept and board an Iranian ship to look for contraband weapons possibly headed to Houthi fighters in Yemen. … But the ship was in international waters in the Arabian Sea, according to two officials. Mr. Mattis ultimately decided to set the operation aside, at least for now. White House officials said that was because news of the impending operation leaked.”

Get that? It was only thanks to what Mattis’s commander in chief has called “illegal leaks” that the operation was (at least temporarily) set aside and military action between the United States and Iran was averted.

Am I exaggerating? Ask the Iranians. “Boarding an Iranian ship is a shortcut” to confrontation, says Seyyed Hossein Mousavian, former member of Iran’s National Security Council and a close ally of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Even if a firefight in international waters were avoided, the Islamic Republic, Mousavian tells me, “would retaliate” and has “many other options for retaliation.” …’

Source: Intercept

And Mattis is the Trump appointee to whom some pundits point as the moderate voice of reason…

‘Common sense tells us that only living things have an inner life. Rabbits and tigers and mice have feelings, sensations and experiences; tables and rocks and molecules do not. Panpsychists deny this datum of common sense. According to panpsychism, the smallest bits of matter – things such as electrons and quarks – have very basic kinds of experience; an electron has an inner life.

The main objection made to panpsychism is that it is ‘crazy’ and ‘just obviously wrong’. It is thought to be highly counterintuitive to suppose that an electron has some kind of inner life, no matter how basic, and this is taken to be a very strong reason to doubt the truth of panpsychism. But many widely accepted scientific theories are also crazily counter to common sense.

…I maintain that there is a powerful simplicity argument in favour of panpsychism. The argument relies on a claim that has been defended by Bertrand Russell, Arthur Eddington and many others, namely that physical science doesn’t tell us what matter is, only what it does. The job of physics is to provide us with mathematical models that allow us to predict with great accuracy how matter will behave. This is incredibly useful information; it allows us to manipulate the world in extraordinary ways, leading to the technological advancements that have transformed our society beyond recognition. But it is one thing to know the behaviour of an electron and quite another to know its intrinsic nature: how the electron is, in and of itself. Physical science gives us rich information about the behaviour of matter but leaves us completely in the dark about its intrinsic nature…’

Source: Phillip Goff, associate professor in philosophy at Central European University in Budapest. His research interest is in consciousness and he blogs at www.conscienceandconsciousness.com. Writing in Aeon.

MATTHEW HAAG and RICHARD FAUSSET write:

‘The state of Arkansas plans to put to death eight inmates over a span of 10 days next month, a pace of executions unequaled in recent American history brought about by a looming expiration date for one of the drugs used in the state’s lethal injection process.

The eight men facing execution — four black and four white — are among 34 inmates on death row in Arkansas, a state where the death penalty has been suspended since 2005 over legal challenges to the state’s laws and difficulty in acquiring the necessary drugs for lethal injections. All eight men were convicted of murders that occurred between 1989 and 1999, and proponents of the death penalty and victims’ rights in the state have been frustrated that the men’s cases have dragged on for so long without resolution…’

Source: New York Times

‘As part of his PhD research for UMass Amherst, Matthew MacWilliams surveyed the psychological characteristics of authoritarians — not the people who lead authoritarian movements, but the followers, those who defer to them.

His work echoed the independent research of Vanderbilt’s Marc Hetherington and UNC’s Jonathan Weiler, whose 2009 book Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics concluded that a sizable fraction of the US voting public were authoritarian: people who wanted to be controlled, and wanted their neighbors to be controlled, because they were afraid the status quo was slipping away and they didn’t believe that anything better would replace it.

They all posit that there are really three American parties, not two: the Democrats, the Republicans, and the authoritarian Republicans, who aren’t conservatives in the sense of wanting tax cuts for the rich or caring about specific religious or moral questions. Rather, they want strong leaders who’ll fight change, preserve hierarchies, and talk tough.

Vox’s Amanda Taub recounts the long struggle to understand authoritarianism, something social scientists have struggled with since the rise of fascism in the mid-twentieth. She describes many authoritarians as latent, waiting to be “activated” by threats — demographic and economic shifts, messages of fear and terror. …’

Source:  Boing Boing

S.V. Date writes:

‘When you get to the White House with such a tiny band of brothers, each and every one seems that much more indispensable.

Or so it must seem to President Donald Trump who, just five weeks into his term and two weeks after having to fire his national security adviser, has now watched his closest Cabinet ally neutered in a key role.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Thursday that he was recusing himself from any investigations pertaining to the Trump campaign, following the revelation that he spoke with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice last year, despite having testified under oath during his confirmation hearings that he had no contact with any Russians.

“I have now decided to recuse myself from any existing or future investigations of any matter relating in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States,” Sessions said at a hastily called news conference.

The attorney general is the one Cabinet member of any presidential administration with the independent authority to launch investigations that could undo the presidency. In Trump’s case, that danger became plausible even before he took office, with U.S. intelligence agencies reporting that Russia had meddled in the presidential election with the goal of electing Trump.

Sessions’ decision to stay out of any of the probes underway now, or to come at some point in the future, means he can no longer shield Trump from the results. …’

Source: The Huffington Post

Ian Millhiser writes:

‘The Washington Post reported Wednesday night that Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke to Russia’s ambassador twice last year, despite testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee that “I did not have communications with the Russians.”

Eighteen years ago, however, then-Sen. Sessions (R-AL) was called upon to judge a president who, he believed, had lied under oath. As political scientist Scott Lemieux notes, Sessions did not look kindly on President Bill Clinton during that president’s impeachment.

It now appears very likely that Sessions committed the very same crime he once voted to convict President Clinton of. The federal perjury statute forbids anyone who has “taken an oath before a competent tribunal, officer, or person” from “willfully and contrary to such oath” making a statement on “any material matter which he does not believe to be true.” …’

Source: Think Progress

‘At the February 5, 2015 meeting of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies initiative in Bethesda, Maryland, Christof Koch, president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, announced something truly startling: His team as identified three previously unnoticed neurons reaching from the an area called the claustrum into both the left and right brain hemispheres, and a massive one that wrapped around the circumference of the entire brain like, in Koch’s words, a “crown of thorns.” The team suspects these neurons may constitute nothing less than the pathways that produce consciousness. Certainly the announcement of a single, entire-brain-encompassing neuron is shocking all by itself…’

Source: Big Think

Kevin Drum writes:

‘Trump signs executive order on immigration, but it’s so badly drafted it causes chaos around the country and is immediately put on hold by court.

Trump chooses crackpot as National Security Advisor, fires him three weeks after inauguration.
Trump tries to bully China by playing games with One China policy, is forced into humiliating retreat after realizing he’s playing out of his league.
Paul Ryan proposes border adjustment tax to raise $1 trillion, but can’t convince anyone to sign on.
Trump casually green-lights raid on Yemen over dinner, it turns into an epic disaster that kills a SEAL and accomplishes nothing.
Trump blathers about the wall and a 20 percent border tax on Mexico, causing the Mexican president to cancel a planned visit.
Congress goes into recess, but Republicans are embarrassingly forced to cancel town hall events because they’re afraid of facing big crowds opposed to their policies.
Trump continues to claim that crime is skyrocketing; that he won a huge election victory; that his inauguration crowd was immense; that polls showing his unpopularity are fake; and that refugees have wreaked terror on America, despite the fact that these are all easily-checkable lies.
After weeks of confusion on their signature priority, Republicans finally realize that repealing Obamacare isn’t all that easy and basically give up.
Trump proposes spending an extra $54 billion on defense without realizing he can’t do that.
Have either Trump or the Republican Congress done anything yet that’s been both successful and non-routine? Unless I’m forgetting something big, it’s just been one failure after another for the past two months. And that’s not even counting all the day-to-day idiocy coming out of the White House (“enemy of the people,” Sweden, “so-called judge,” Bowling Green massacre, national security confabs at Mar-a-Lago restaurant, etc.).

Help me out here. Am I missing some big success? …’

Source:  Mother Jones

‘Using high-powered lasers, paleontologists have detected rare traces of soft tissue in the fossilized remains of Anchiornis—a four-winged dinosaur that lived during the late Jurassic period. The findings are offering new insights into the origin of birds and the development of flight…’

Source: Gizmodo

Nassim Taleb writes:

‘…Avoid people who look and talk the part, whether surgeons or scientists or stockbrokers. They are trying to win your confidence by means of rituals rather than results. Practitioners who are exceptionally good at producing results have less need to conform to professional stereotypes. And those who succeed in a profession despite not looking the part must, all other things being equal, have greater talent…’

Source:  Medium

There is another, related point to make — nonconformity may be its own virtue. Is this what Thoreau meant:

“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”

‘Broadly speaking, there are two explanations for why we lose all this stuff—one scientific, the other psychoanalytic, both unsatisfying. According to the scientific account, losing things represents a failure of recollection or a failure of attention: either we can’t retrieve a memory (of where we set down our wallet, say) or we didn’t encode one in the first place.

According to the psychoanalytic account, conversely, losing things represents a success—a deliberate sabotage of our rational mind by our subliminal desires. In “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” Freud describes “the unconscious dexterity with which an object is mislaid on account of hidden but powerful motives,” including “the low estimation in which the lost object is held, or a secret antipathy towards it or towards the person that it came from.” Freud’s colleague and contemporary Abraham Arden Brill put the matter more succinctly: “We never lose what we highly value.” …’

Source: Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker

‘Maybe you don’t have a lot of street performers where you live, but all over the world they represent a web of underrepresented artists dedicated to performing live, day after day. It’s exactly that fleeting, often unremarked quality of street music that led Daniel Bacchieri, currently a Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism Fellow at CUNY, to launch the Street Music Map project in 2014…’

Source: Atlas Obscura

Here are 25 places to see yetis, sea monsters, Sasquatch, and other cryptids.

Source: Atlas Obscura

‘University of Manchester particle physicist and media personality, Brian Cox, may have sparked off a controversy. He said, during BBC Radio Four’s, The Infinite Monkey Cage program, “I want to make a statement: We are not here to debate the existence of ghosts because they don’t exist.”

He went on to explain:”If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made. We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection at the Large Hadron Collider. That’s almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies.”

Astrophysicist and media personality Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was also a guest on the show, clarified by saying, “If I understand what you just declared, you just asserted that CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, disproved the existence of ghosts.”

Cox said yes. If ghosts were real, he posits, they would have a certain frequency or particle associated with them, corresponding with the human or body, with which it was once attached. If that was the case, we would be able to detect them. After all this time and with all our advanced instruments, we haven’t picked up anything close…’

Source: Big Think

‘This document has been making the rounds in a number of magical groups both secretive and public. It was allegedly created by a member of a private magical order who wishes to remain anonymous. I make no claims about its efficacy, and several people have noted it can be viewed as more of a mass art/consciousness-raising project (similar to the 1967 exorcism and levitation of the Pentagon), than an actual magical working. But many are clearly taking it very seriously. …’

Source: Medium

Farhad Manjoo writes:

…’Mr. Trump is likely to be president for at least the next four years. And it’s probably not a good idea for just about all of our news to be focused on a single subject for that long.

In previous media eras, the news was able to find a sensible balance even when huge events were preoccupying the world. Newspapers from World War I and II were filled with stories far afield from the war. Today’s newspapers are also full of non-Trump articles, but many of us aren’t reading newspapers anymore. We’re reading Facebook and watching cable, and there, Mr. Trump is all anyone talks about, to the exclusion of almost all else.

There’s no easy way out of this fix. But as big as Mr. Trump is, he’s not everything — and it’d be nice to find a way for the media ecosystem to recognize that.

Source: NYTimes.com

‘Unprecedented growth marked the era from 1948 to 1973. Economists might study it forever, but it can never be repeated. Why?’

Source: Marc Levinson, Aeon Essays

‘While frogs haven’t traditionally been revered for their cuteness, a stunning new discovery could be a game-changer for all of ribbit-kind: According to a study published this week in PeerJ, scientists have discovered seven new frog species belonging to the genus Nyctibatrachus, commonly known as Night Frogs. Four of them are alarmingly tiny—in fact, they’re thought to be some of the smallest frogs in all of India, where they were found…’

Source: Gizmodo

• ‘NASA astronomers have discovered a single star system, 40 light-years away, that has seven Earth-like planets (small, rocky, and within the range of orbit in which liquid water could form). [Vox / Brian Resnick]
• Three of the planets are directly in what’s called the “habitable zone,” meaning temperature water could easily remain in liquid form on their surfaces; the other four could have water as well, depending on the compositions of their atmospheres. [NASA]
• The star at the center of the system — called Trappist-1 — isn’t like the sun at all. It’s a super-cool dwarf star (which means sunsets on these planets are likely salmon-colored). [The Atlantic / Marina Koren]
• That’s actually extremely promising — not only are super-cool stars easier to discover planets around (because they are dim enough to flicker when a planet passes in front of them), but they are also far more common than sun-like stars. [TRAPPIST.one]
• To discover more potential Earth-like planets around super-cool stars, NASA is working with an initiative called (in an epic act of backronymy) SPECULOOS — like the cookie butter. [SPECULOOS]
• Few, if any, of these worlds will actually be habitable by human standards. The astronomical term “habitable” applies to plenty of arrangements that sensible humans would call, as Katie Mack puts it, “lethal nightmare planets.” [Cosmos / Katie Mack]
• But for the moment, the planets of Trappist-1 exist in the world of tantalizing possibility. Fittingly, Nature magazine published a sci-fi story side by side with the paper announcing the discovery. [Nature / Laurence Suhner]’

Alex Yablon writes:

The Fourth Circuit decision is the first to expressly reject a right to bear an AR-15 or other “weapons of war.”

Source: The Trace

‘Donald Trump has been president for all or part of 33 days. He has averaged four falsehoods or misleading statements a day(!) in that time. There hasn’t been a single day of Trump’s presidency in which he has said nothing false or misleading…’

Source: Washington Post via Bessel

Support your local fact-checker!

Like doomsday scenarios? ‘We’re about to kick off the sixth great extinction event. And we’ll follow shortly after.’

Source: Big Think

People took to the streets of Boston again Sunday afternoon — this time in the name of science.

Source: Boston.com

‘We know, by this point, that Trump is funny. Even to us leftists, horrified by his every move, he is hilarious. Someone who is all brash confidence and then outrageously incompetent at everything he does is — from an objective standpoint — comedy gold. Someone who accuses his enemies of the faults he at that very moment is portraying is comedy gold. But, strangely, as the left realized after the election, pointing out Trump was a joke was not helpful. In fact, Trump’s farcical nature didn’t seem to be a liability, rather, to his supporters, it was an asset.

…Trump supporters voted for the con-man, the labyrinth with no center, because the labyrinth with no center is how they feel, how they feel the world works around them. A labyrinth with no center is a perfect description of their mother’s basement with a terminal to an endless array of escapist fantasy worlds…’

Source: Medium

‘I think it’s important not to dismiss the president’s [attacks on
the press] simply as dumb. We ought to assume that it’s darkly brilliant — if not in intention than certainly in effect. The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument.

He isn’t [saying] that he’s got his facts wrong. He’s saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people understand the term, don’t matter: That they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion; and that statements of fact needn’t have any purchase against a man who is either sufficiently powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to deny them — or, in his case, both…’

Source: Time.com

‘Although the US government has launched formal inquiries into the UFO phenomenon, little has changed in the last six decades to indicate that ufology will ever be anything more than pseudoscientific. But Bob Davis, a retired neuroscientist and self-described “UFO agnostic,” wants to change that. I caught up with him at the International UFO Congress to find out why he thinks ufology can become a serious scientific discipline…’

Source: Motherboard

‘In 1990, the International Academy of Astronautics published a special issue of their journal , Acta Astronautica, dedicated to the problem of what to do in the event that the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) detected an alien signal. These “post-detection protocols” as outlined in the IAA’s Declaration of Principles in 1989 were inspired by increasingly rapid technological advances in the SETI field that made the likelihood of detecting a signal more likely than at any other point in the search’s 30 year history.

But the one technological development that its collaborators couldn’t have anticipated was the rise of social media, which could seriously complicate the ability of government and private research institutions to control the social consequences resulting from the detection of an extraterrestrial message…’

Source: Motherboard

‘John McCain is increasingly mad as hell about President Trump. And on Friday, he went after Trump — hard.

During a speech at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, the Republican senator from Arizona delivered a pointed and striking point-by-point takedown of Trump’s worldview and brand of nationalism. McCain didn’t mention Trump’s name once, but he didn’t have to.

And even considering the two men’s up-and-down history and the terrible things Trump has said about McCain, it was a striking display from a senior leader of a party when it comes to a president of the same party.

In his speech, McCain suggested the Western world is uniquely imperiled this year — even more so than when Barack Obama was president — and proceeded to question whether it will even survive.

“In recent years, this question would invite accusations of hyperbole and alarmism; not this year,” McCain said. “If ever there were a time to treat this question with a deadly seriousness, it is now.” …’

Source: Washington Post

Senator Susan Collins from Maine is the first Republican to announce that she will vote NO on Scott Pruitt’s nomination to lead the EPA. We only need to get a couple more Senators to join her — but we need your help!

Your pressure is working. Just yesterday the nominee for labor secretary, fast food titan Andy Puzder, withdrew his nomination due to growing opposition.

The Senate is scheduled to vote on Pruitt’s confirmation as EPA head tomorrow. Please take  just a minute to call and email your Senators and urge them to vote NO on Scott Pruitt for EPA! Call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 to be connected with the Senate office of your choice. Don’t know who your Senators are? Look them up here.

Source: Center for Food Safety

‘In contemporary English, here refers to the speaker’s location regardless of whether the sentence involves things or people remaining in that place, moving to that place, or leaving that place. We say I have been waiting here for hours or Come here! or Get out of here!

But historically English has used three separate adverbs to convey these three different relations to place. A speaker of the sixteenth century might have said I have been waiting here for hours, but she would have said Come hither! instead of Come here! and Get thee hence! instead of Get out of here!

Likewise, when referring to a location other than where we are, we now use there indiscriminately: Who is there? I will take you there. We sailed from Ireland to Iceland and from there to Greenland. Our sixteenth-century speaker, for her part, might have said Who is there? but I will take you thither or We sailed from Ireland to Iceland and thence to Greenland.

Finally, for asking about places, though English relies now on just where, there were once three separate adverbs. If our twenty-first-century speaker says Where am I? or Where are you going? or Where is that smell coming from? our hypothetical Elizabethan speaker might say Where am I? or Whither goest thou? or Whence cometh that reek?’

Source: 3quarksdaily

We elect our President via the Electoral College. States get a vote for each Representative and each Senator. Representatives are somewhat proportional to population but every state has two Senators. This creates a huge imbalance in the power of your vote.

If you live in Texas that’s 733,226 people per elector. In Wyoming it’s just 195,167. Occasionally this has consequences.

Presidents we could have avoided.

As well as sacrificing one person one vote there are other issues with the Electoral College.

Presidential candidates largely ignore states where the outcome is nearly certain. If you live in a solid Republican or Democrat state then you will be taken for granted.

Originally the Electoral College was supposed to be a safeguard against the electorate making a horrible mistake. You might have good reason to believe that it no longer serves this purpose.

National Popular Vote

We could fix the imbalance with an amendment to the Constitution. This would require a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters (38) of the States.

Luckily there is another option. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). The plan is quite simple. Each State passes legislation that promises to throw its Electoral College votes behind the popular vote winner. This only comes into force when enough States have enacted the NPVIC to have a majority in the Electoral College (270 votes)

You might be surprised to learn that the National Popular Vote already has 165 Electoral College votes. Adding Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Texas would be enough to switch to a popular vote. They are also all states that are among the least well represented by the current system.

Most Americans support the National Popular Vote (78% of Democrats, 60% of Republicans and 73% of Independents). (Source: Washington Post, 2007)

What can I do?

You can make a difference. Please do at least one of the following:

1. Share this page with your friends on Facebook and Twitter with a personal message asking them to take action.
2. Call your Senators and Representative and ask them to support the National Popular Vote.
3. Call your State representatives and ask them to support the National Popular Vote.
4. Donate to the National Popular Vote (this site has no affiliation with National Popular Vote Inc.)

‘We already know that the Trump administration plans to deregulate markets, wage all-out war on “radical Islamic terrorism,” trash climate science and unleash a fossil-fuel frenzy. It’s a vision that can be counted on to generate a tsunami of crises and shocks: economic shocks, as market bubbles burst; security shocks, as blowback from foreign belligerence comes home; weather shocks, as our climate is further destabilized; and industrial shocks, as oil pipelines spill and rigs collapse, which they tend to do, especially when enjoying light-touch regulation.

All this is dangerous enough. What’s even worse is the way the Trump administration can be counted on to exploit these shocks politically and economically…’

Source: The Intercept

‘Ethically speaking, mental health experts are supposed to refrain from publicly offering diagnoses for politicians. And so, for the most part, doctors and psychiatrists have refrained from joining in on the internet speculation that President Donald Trump has narcissistic personality disorder, dementia, or another condition.

But that changed in Tuesday’s New York Times, in a very public way. A pair of letters — written originally in response to Charles Blow’s scathing op-ed about the president — authored by prominent psychiatric experts faced off on the question of Trump’s mental health.

The first, written by Dr. Lance Dodes and Dr. Joseph Schachter and signed by 33 other experts, asserts that Trump is unfit to lead the country given his mental state. The latter, which was penned by Dr. Allen Frances (who literally wrote the criteria that define narcissistic personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV), sharply rebukes Dodes and Schacter’s letter…’

Source: Digg

Dr. Frances makes several arguments. The first is that although Trump has impressive narcissism, he should not be considered to have narcissistic personality disorder because the disorder requires that his personality attributes cause him distress or dysfunction. His second objection to the letter is to reiterate the ethical standards against a clinician making a diagnosis of someone she is not engaged in treating face-to-face.

Here is my response, as a psychiatrist myself. First, the requirement that the patient be distressed is only partly true in modern practice, particularly for the subset of mental conditions known as personality disorders. Rigid personality styles often act to defend the patient against insight into their disorder and any distress caused by their way of doing business in the world. Instead, they cause distress among those around him or her. They cause dysfunction for the afflicted person without distressing her or him.

Secondly, for an ethical relativist, a sufficient emergency such as that we face now allows suspension of some ethical guidelines for the greater good.

Of course, I am far from confident that the opinion of any number of experts that this man is unfit to serve as President will actually influence anything. Frances’ coda that “the antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological” may well be true, but we should all continue to speak our version of truth to power. I am firmly with Dodes and Schachter.

Sean Illing: The president of the United States just tweeted that “Information is being illegally given” to the New York Times and the Washington Post “by the intelligence community.” Are we witnessing a shadow war between President Trump and the intelligence community?

…Glenn Carle: What’s happened is that the organs of government sworn to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States have been trying to do their jobs. Intelligence professionals take their responsibilities seriously. Whatever they do, they do it because they believe it is necessary, because they believe duty demands it. They’re not playing political games… The real issue is what I’ve been saying… in public for many months: We are facing the gravest threat to our institutions and our government since 1861, since the country broke in half. This is a graver crisis than Watergate, which was about corruption, not the usurpation of our laws and our checks and balances. It’s graver than World War II, when Hitler never actually threatened our institutions or occupation of Washington.

Source: Vox

‘Some 188,000 people from counties that mostly supported him were evacuated when authorities said the risk of a sudden and dramatic overspill became too high, but Orange Julius remained silent for days after California governor Jerry Brown requested he declare a federal emergency in the state…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Though Steve Miller claims that Trump is “a president who has done more in three weeks than most presidents have done in an entire administration,” the reality is that almost everything in his executive orders is either an inflammatory restatement of an existing policy; an unenforceable and meaningless intervention into domains where the administrative branch holds no sway; or (as in the case of the Muslim Ban), is an unconstitutional omnishambles destined to be swiftly undone by the courts…

What Trump has done is created a bunch of presidential news-hits, but not much presidenting…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Through targeted ads on Facebook, we’re reaching out to users who list federal agencies as their employers, and we are exploring ways to advertise in public spaces near federal buildings in Washington, D.C. If you work in the federal bureaucracy and want to bear witness, anonymously or otherwise, to the way the Trump Administration is asserting its authority, we are here to listen. And if you know someone who works for the government and may have information to share, please direct them to TellOnTrump.com.’

Source: Tell on Trump

‘Immigrants… across the country plan to participate in the “Day Without Immigrants” boycott, a response to President Trump’s pledges to crack down on those in the country illegally, use “extreme vetting” and build a wall along the Mexican border. The social-media-organized protest aims to show the president the effect immigrants have in the country on a daily basis. The boycott calls for immigrants not to attend work, open their businesses, spend money or even send their children to school…’

Source: Washington Post

‘In the past decade, DNA sequencing has gotten really, really cheap, positioning genetics to become the next big consumer health craze. The sales pitch—a roadmap for life encoded in your very own DNA—can be hard to resist. But scientists are skeptical that we’ve decrypted enough about the human genome to turn strings of As, Ts, Cs and Gs into useful personalized lifestyle advice…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘At least 188,000 residents in the areas surrounding the Oroville Dam in Northern California have had to evacuate their homes as workers scramble to prevent a potentially catastrophic breach. Now, reports are surfacing indicating local officials were warned about safety issues with the Oroville Dam 12 years ago, and did little to mitigate them. Besides serving as a scary dose of hindsight, these reports are a grim reminder that experts have been sounding the alarm about our nation’s aging infrastructure for a long time. In most cases, they haven’t gained much traction…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘If you’d like to make your voice heard in politics, protests and call-in campaigns are only part of the story. A new report from the nonpartisan, nonprofit Congressional Management Foundation helps us understand the best ways to get a message through…’

Source: Lifehacker

‘Doctors at the University of Minnesota Medical School, who have been studying the skeletal structures of both Republicans for months, believe that their ability to stand, walk, and even break into a brisk trot when confronted by reporters’ questions is “virtually inexplicable.” …’

Source: Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker

‘I think this is a fundamental reason why so many of us have been so unsettled, anxious, and near panic these past few months. It is not so much this president’s agenda. That always changes from administration to administration. It is that when the linchpin of an entire country is literally delusional, clinically deceptive, and responds to any attempt to correct the record with rage and vengeance, everyone is always on edge. …’

Source: Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine

Really quite simple:

‘…[I]n the current authoritarian climate, the [only] way to keep a government from using a border-crossing as a basis for acquiring your sensitive data without a warrant is to make sure that you do not possess, and cannot access, your data at a border…’

Source: Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

‘…Our Intelligence Community is so worried by the unprecedented problems of the Trump administration—not only do senior officials possess troubling ties to the Kremlin, there are nagging questions about basic competence regarding Team Trump—that it is beginning to withhold intelligence from a White House which our spies do not trust.

That the IC has ample grounds for concern is demonstrated by almost daily revelations of major problems inside the White House, a mere three weeks after the inauguration. The president has repeatedly gone out of his way to antagonize our spies, mocking them and demeaning their work, and Trump’s personal national security guru can’t seem to keep his story straight on vital issues.

That’s Mike Flynn, the retired Army three-star general who now heads the National Security Council. Widely disliked in Washington for his brash personality and preference for conspiracy-theorizing over intelligence facts, Flynn was fired as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency for managerial incompetence and poor judgment—flaws he has brought to the far more powerful and political NSC.

Flynn’s problems with the truth have been laid bare by the growing scandal about his dealings with Moscow. Strange ties to the Kremlin, including Vladimir Putin himself, have dogged Flynn since he left DIA, and concerns about his judgment have risen considerably since it was revealed that after the November 8 election, Flynn repeatedly called the Russian embassy in Washington to discuss the transition. The White House has denied that anything substantive came up in conversations between Flynn and Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador.

That was a lie, as confirmed by an extensively sourced bombshell report in The Washington Post, which makes clear that Flynn grossly misrepresented his numerous conversations with Kislyak—which turn out to have happened before the election too, part of a regular dialogue with the Russian embassy. To call such an arrangement highly unusual in American politics would be very charitable.

In particular, Flynn and Kislyak discussed the possible lifting of the sanctions President Obama placed on Russia and its intelligence services late last year in retaliation for the Kremlin’s meddling in our 2016 election. In public, Flynn repeatedly denied that any talk of sanctions occurred during his conversations with Russia’s ambassador. Worse, he apparently lied in private too, including to Vice President Mike Pence, who when this scandal broke last month publicly denied that Flynn conducted any sanctions talk with Kislyak. Pence and his staff are reported to be very upset with the national security adviser, who played the vice president for a fool. …’

Source: John R. Schindler, Observer

‘A worry for Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers is creating a world devoid of consciousness. He sees the discussion of future superintelligences often presume that eventually AIs will become conscious. But what if that kind of sci-fi possibility that we will create completely artificial humans is not going to come to fruition? Instead, we could be creating a world endowed with artificial intelligence but not actual consciousness…’

Source: Big Think

‘…It’s understandable that someone would find the ocean sunfish repellently dumb. Even the mola mola’s many nicknames—schwimmender kopf (“swimming head”) in German, putol (“cut short”) in the Philippines, and “toppled car fish” in Taiwan—belie its absurd reputation. That last one is an especially accurate burn, because the mola mola grows to roughly the size and shape of a trash-compacted car.

Seriously, these things are huge. The ocean sunfish holds the Guinness world record for heaviest, most fecund bony fish. One of the biggest of these gold star boys weighed 5,071 pounds. The average weight is more like one ton, but it carries that heft along six to 10 feet of flattened flesh, flapping through the water like a smashed Prius. A mola mola raised in Monterey Bay Aquarium had to be airlifted out by helicopter and released into the bay when it gained 800 pounds in 14 months and outgrew its tank.

[I]s the mola mola actually as worthless as many of its haters seem to think? To try and settle the world’s nerdiest flame war, let’s go through the finer points of the ocean sunfish’s singular existence….’

Source: Motherboard

‘Squid and their cephalopod brethren have been the inspiration for many a science fiction creature. Their slippery appendages, huge proportions, and inking abilities can be downright shudder-inducing. (See: Arrival.) But you should probably be more concerned by the cephalopod’s huge brain—which not only helps it solve tricky puzzles, but also lets it converse in its own sign language.

…Certain kinds of squid send messages by manipulating the color of their skin. “Their body patterning is fantastic, fabulous,” says Chuan-Chin Chiao, a neuroscientist at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. They can display bands, or stripes, or turn completely dark or light. And Chiao is trying to crack their code…’

Source: WIRED

‘Russian President Vladimir Putin signaled that he wanted to help avoid the nuclear apocalypse during his first phone call with President Donald Trump, and Trump reportedly fumbled it—all because he had no idea what the most important treaty between America and Russia was.

According to news reports, Putin asked if Trump was willing to extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), the Obama-era nuclear weapons pact that requires each nation to cap their deployed warheads at 1,500 apiece… But there was one problem, according to Reuters: Trump didn’t know what New START was…’

Source: Jalopnik

‘For all the recitations of Emma Lazarus — give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses — the story of American openness to immigrants and refugees is more cramped, more Trumpian, than our national myths suggest. In order to understand and undo the Muslim ban (and given the prioritization of religious minorities in those seven countries, a Muslim ban it is) we need to understand why it is in fact in line with our history, even as it feels so un-American.’

Source: Vox

‘The president of the United States has essentially unconstrained authority to use nuclear weapons however he sees fit.

So what would happen if the president, in the judgment of those closest to him, were to … not be in his right mind?

In such a scenario, there is, in fact, something that could quickly and legally be done to avert global catastrophe. The answer lies in Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.

The amendment states that if, for whatever reason, the vice president and a majority of sitting Cabinet secretaries decide that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” they can simply put that down in writing and send it to two people — the speaker of the House and the Senate’s president pro tem.

 Then the vice president would immediately become “Acting President,” and take over all the president’s powers.

Let that sink in — one vice president and any eight Cabinet officers can, theoretically, decide to knock the president out of power at any time.

If the president wants to dispute this move, he can, but then it would be up to Congress to settle the matter with a vote. A two-thirds majority in both houses would be necessary to keep the vice president in charge. If that threshold isn’t reached, the president would regain his powers.

 Section 4 of the 25th Amendment has never been invoked in reality, though it’s a staple of thriller fiction. But there’s been a sudden surge of interest in it in recent months, as reports of Donald Trump’s bizarre behavior behind closed doors have been piling up, and there is increasingly unsubtle speculation in Washington about the health of the president’s mind.’

Source: Vox

Yeah, but…Pence??

‘I was lucky enough to have a conversation with Margaret Atwood today, about the sudden popularity of her dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale. You can hear that story here. But there was one thing that didn’t make it into the finished piece — a moment when I asked Atwood what she thought the next big trend would be in dystopian reading. People have been devouring The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, Brave New World, It Can’t Happen Here and The Plot Against America — so what’s the next book we’ll be reporting on?

Well, it won’t be a book, according to Atwood. “The question to be asked is, if somebody does write such a novel where will it be published?” she says. “I think we might go back to newspaper serials … Because events are evolving so fast it would almost take a serial form to keep up with them.”

One installment a week, Atwood says, and “I would make my narrator somebody from within one of the alt-Twitter handles that are popping up all over — as alternative Department of Justice, alternative Parks Department, alternative Education.” Someone inside the government, who’s risking their job to leak information to the public.

Dear readers, you know I asked Margaret Atwood if she’d be willing to write this for me here at NPR. But she says she’s not the right one for the job. “Number one, I’m too old,” she says. “But number two, it would have to be somebody there, who’s pretty close to events as they unfold. Almost like Samuel Pepys’ diary,” she says, referencing the famous English chronicler. “‘Dear diary, you would never believe what happened today! Dear diary, are they on to me? My milkshake tasted funny.'”

Atwood says a story like that would boost newspaper sales, “employ fiction writers and follow the situation while it’s unfolding — while you’re still allowed to read!”

So, speculative fiction writers, get on it! (Though personally, now I’m always going to wonder if it’s really Margaret Atwood tweeting as @AltUSNatParkService.)’

Source: Petra Mayer, NPR

‘Imagine feeling angry or upset whenever you hear a certain everyday sound. It’s a condition called misophonia, and we know little about its causes. Now there’s evidence that misophonics show distinctive brain activity whenever they hear their trigger sounds, a finding that could help devise coping strategies and treatments.

Olana Tansley-Hancock knows misophonia’s symptoms only too well. From the age of about 7 or 8, she experienced feelings of rage and discomfort whenever she heard the sound of other people eating. By adolescence, she was eating many of her meals alone. As time wore on, many more sounds would trigger her misophonia. Rustling papers and tapping toes on train journeys constantly forced her to change seats and carriages. Clacking keyboards in the office meant she was always making excuses to leave the room.

Finally, she went to a doctor for help. “I got laughed at,” she says.

“People who suffer from misophonia often have to make adjustments to their lives, just to function,” says Miren Edelstein at the University of California, San Diego. “Misophonia seems so odd that it’s difficult to appreciate how disabling it can be,” says her colleague, V. S. Ramachandran.

The condition was first given the name misophonia in 2000, but until 2013, there had only been two case studies published. More recently, clear evidence has emerged that misophonia isn’t a symptom of other conditions, such as obsessive compulsive disorder, nor is it a matter of being oversensitive to other people’s bad manners.

Some studies, including work by Ramachandran and Edelstein, have found that trigger sounds spur a full fight-or-flight response in people with misophonia.’

Source: New Scientist

‘An international team of scientists think they’ve created a stable helium compound, meaning one composed of both helium and sodium atoms together. The discovery would be wild not only because of the way it goes against some of our basic assumptions of chemistry, but would also help scientists better understand the way atoms act in the high-pressure centers of gas giant planets…’

Source: Gizmodo

‘In 2012, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland famously found a particle that acted like the Higgs boson, an elusive and long-theorized particle that imbues mass to matter. Usha Mallik, a University of Iowa physicist, thinks that they might have caught an “impostor” masquerading as the Higgs, and that it’s possible we still haven’t found the real Higgs boson at all…’

Source: Motherboard

‘President Donald Trump threatened to “destroy” the career of a Texas state senator after a Texas sheriff accused the lawmaker of getting in his way by promoting asset forfeiture reform.
“Want to give his name? We’ll destroy his career,” Trump told Sheriff Harold Eavenson of Rockwall County, Texas. Trump’s comment was met with laughter and Eavenson declined to give the official’s name. …’

Source: Sam Levine, Huffington Post .

Trump staff later explained he was ‘joking.’ Of course, what they meant is that he is the joke. Unfortunately the joke’s on us.  #notmeinfuhrer

‘The most aggressive edge of the resistance marches under the banner of anti-fascism, or “antifa.” While most Americans would likely agree that “fascism is bad,” anti-fascism is a more specific set of politics. The antifa banner features black and red flags, signifying an alliance between anarchists and communists. What unites these two groups (who have been known to kill one another from time to time) is a commitment to confront and defeat fascists and white supremacists by whatever means necessary. It’s a coalition that has existed for as long as fascism has; the Italian Arditi del Popolo (People’s Squads) rose to fight Mussolini in 1921, even when the Socialist and Communist Parties refused to support them. In 1924, anarchist lumberjacks allied with the International Workers of the World waged a “drawn battle” with a Ku Klux Klan recruitment drive in Greenville, Maine. American anti-fascists have been fighting a mostly quiet conflict with domestic Nazis at punk rock venues and small white-nationalist gatherings for decades, but, as fascists have snuck their collective jackboot into the curved door of the Oval Office, the struggle has reached the mainstream…’

Source: Pacific Standard

These records have revealed many cases of abuse and mistreatment of animals, incidents that, if the reports had not been publicly posted, would likely have remained hidden. This action plunges journalists, animal welfare organizations, and the public at large into the dark about animal welfare at facilities across the country. The records document violations of the Animal Welfare Act, the federal law that regulates treatment of animals used for research and exhibition.

 

The USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which has maintained the online database, cites privacy concerns as justification for the removal. Critics question that reasoning. The agency has long redacted sensitive information from these records, and commercial facilities do not necessarily have the same right to privacy as private individuals…

Adam Roberts, CEO of Born Free USA, an animal advocacy nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., is “shocked” by the purge. He says the documents shed light on cruelty in “substandard roadside zoos, shameful animal circuses, puppy breeding factories and more.” Often, the animals in these facilities may have visible wounds or cramped conditions or no access to water, according to Roberts. He says “the government’s decision to make it harder to access this information further protects animal exploiters in the shroud of secrecy on which their nefarious activities thrive.”

From now on the documents will be accessible only via official requests made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). FOIA requests can take months to process. That’s far too long, Roberts says. When Born Free receives welfare complaints from concerned citizens, he says the organization has always checked USDA records to see if any complaints had already been made involving the facility or animal in question. Waiting months for a FOIA report for information that previously could be obtained with the click of a button “may mean prolonged suffering for an animal in need,” Roberts says.

Source: National Geographic

‘Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba and the second-richest man in China, visited Australia on Saturday. He had a dire warning for Trump and his hardline, anti-globalization ideas about trade: this could be war.Ma was in Melbourne to celebrate the opening of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s Australia/New Zealand headquarters. Speaking to attendees at the event, Ma said: “Everybody is concerned about trade wars. If trade stops, war starts.” …’

Source: Gizmodo

It appears that the Senate needs one more vote to deny Betsy DeVos the nomination for Secretary of Education. Republican Senator Richard Burr of NC may be on the fence about whether or not to vote for  DeVos — who is unqualified, opposed to public education, and a plagiarist as well. 
Sen. Burr’s number is 202-224-3154. That phone line takes calls at any time and  is set up so that it only takes a moment to leave a message. Supposedly they are tracking the number of calls they get. It may not matter that you are not his constituent. 

‘…With all the pies that Trump has stuck his financial finger into, it might be tough to know which brands to avoid. Here are the big ones. …’

Source: Justin Andress, Destination Tips

‘President Trump’s antagonizing of people around the world has sparked quite the backlash. He’s instituting barely coded religious tests, “yelling” at and hanging up on leaders of democratic countries, and still vowing to build that big, beautiful border wall. (Now partly transparent!) Last week, the Netherlands tried to assuage fears of friction with an “official” welcome video, using President Trump’s own words to promise he’ll be embraced with open arms. As its new saying goes, “America First, the Netherlands Second.”

Turns out that Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, and Germany—where citizens’ trust in the U.S. has eroded to a record low—all want to get in on the Trump trolling, too. Comedy shows in these countries have recently produced their own “second” videos, featuring Trump impersonations that sharply mimic his unique oratory eloquence. Some, like Swiss TV show Deville Late Night’s parody, compare their country directly to the Netherlands in Trumpian fashion: “Look at those mountains, those big flat mountains,” the voice-over goes. “We’re not flat like, for example, the Netherlands. They are so flat. Total disaster.”…’

Source: David Canfield, Slate.

At least go sit, preferably in numbers, by your Muslim brethren being harassed by ignorant racist xenophobes like this:

‘Alexander MacKinnon thought it would be “my word against hers” after he directed racial abuse at Sanaa Shahid on a train out of London—the sneering solicitor said she shouldn’t be in the country, let alone first class. Unfortunately for him, he was overheard…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘A trio of “scientists against a fascist government” set out a program for resisting trumpism with science, delving into the moral duty of scientists to resist the perversion of their work to attain cruel and evil ends.Trumpism includes savage attacks on ideologically inconvenient science — climate science especially — as well as xenophobic attacks on scientists themselves…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Radiation levels inside a damaged reactor at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant have hit a record high, and are the worst since the plant suffered a triple meltdown nearly six years ago… Radiation levels inside the containment vessel of reactor No. 2 at Fukushima have reached 530 sieverts per hour—a figure described by experts as “unimaginable.” …The radiation level inside the plant now far exceeds the previous high of 73 sieverts per hour, which was recorded soon after the triple meltdown in March 2011…

Needless to say, this plant is not fit for human life. Just one dose of a single sievert is enough to cause radiation sickness and nausea. Exposure to four to five sieverts would kill about half of those exposed to it within a month, while a single dose of 10 sieverts is enough to kill a person within weeks.

These surging radiation levels are complicating plans to dismantle the plant. According to the National Institute of Radiological Sciences, medical professionals aren’t prepared to treat patients who have been exposed to the levels of radiation currently experienced at the facility. This is a big problem for Tepco, which plans to remove fuel debris as part of the decommissioning process. The dismantling of Fukushima is scheduled to start in 2021 and could take nearly a half-century.

Officials with Tepco aren’t entirely sure why radiation levels are on such a dramatic upward trend. Either previous readings were insufficient or incorrect, or conditions inside the plant are changing. Problem is, the interior condition of the plant is still a big mystery. The high readings suggest that some of the melted fuel that escaped the pressure vessel is lingering nearby. Should this be confirmed, it would mark the first time that tainted debris has been found in any of the three reactors that suffered core meltdowns. Tepco has been unable to confirm the condition of the melted fuel owing to the extreme and inhospitable conditions inside…’

Source: Gizmodo 

‘…One of the strangest properties of our universe is that it has very low entropy, meaning there is relatively low disorder, or conversely a large amount of order, among all of the particles. Think of it this way: Imagine a bomb full of sand exploding onto an empty surface—that’s the Big Bang. You would expect a pretty uniform heap of sand after the explosion, but instead, our universe immediately arranged into lots of sand castles seemingly for no reason and with no help, and we don’t really know why, Stefan Countryman, a physics Ph.D. student at Columbia University, explained to Gizmodo. The Big Bang could have (and maybe should have) resulted in a high-entropy mass of uniformly distributed, disorganized stuff. Instead, we’ve got star systems, galaxies, and galactic clusters all linked together with dark voids between them. We have order.

Additionally, entropy or disorder can only increase over time—without outside help, the sand castles will erode away. In fact, according to Carroll, our observation of time is dependent on increasing entropy since the universe began. Entropy is a physical property that is completely time dependent, riding the one-way time train into the future.  So: the laws of physics say entropy can only increase, and today’s entropy is still very low. Carroll says that means the early universe had to have had even lower entropy—in other words, it must have been even more organized. That has implications for what things were like before the Big Bang. “There’s a lot of people who think the early universe was simple, smooth and featureless with tiny little ripples and that’s a natural place for universe to start,” said Carroll. “Once you think about entropy… your perspective changes and you realize it’s something you have to explain.” …’

Source: Gizmodo

‘Patients with complete “locked-in syndrome”—conscious, but fully paralyzed and unable to move even their eyes—may soon be able to mentally break out.Using a new, noninvasive device that measures brain waves and blood flow, four locked-in patients were able to communicate by answering yes or no questions, neuroscientists report this week in PLOS Biology. The four patients, all completely paralyzed by Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), answered geography questions, correctly identified family members’ names, and even said they were happy and glad to be alive…’

Source: Ars Technica

‘Erica Chenoweth, co-author of Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, says “nonviolent resistance has actually been the quickest, least costly, and safest way to struggle” effectively against dictatorships…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘A flying saucer was spotted on a Google Earth image near the South Pole in Antarctica. You can see it right here. Mysterious Universe claims that “melting ice could have formed a round depression as it sank into the surrounding snow, or wind could have created a small whirlwind effect as it blew into alcoves in the rock wall.” Screw that though. I want to believe…’

Source: Boing Boing

Beginning with:

‘1. Do not obey in advance.Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.’

Source: Quartz

‘On Wednesday, Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman in 78 years to be awarded the prestigious Fields Medal, considered the highest honor in mathematics. She was selected for “stunning advances in the theory of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.” …’

Source: Katie Rose Quandt, Mother Jones

‘You know the singularity has arrived when the robots start playing marimbas. Shimon, engineer Guy Hoffman’s robot musician, doesn’t play programmed music — it improvises in ensembles with human players, communicating with a “socially expressive head” and favoring musical ideas that are unlikely to be chosen by humans, so as to lead the performance in genuinely novel directions…’

Source: Futility Closet

‘…There are probably more than enough Republicans who are conflicted about the Republican agenda or committed to the Senate as an institution to stave off calls from President Trump or House conservatives to abolish the filibuster. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has been clear about his disinterest in limiting obstruction during the 115th Congress, and he would probably struggle to form a majority for filibuster reform if he tried. So for the next 23 months, I expect to see a series of struggles to get the Republican agenda through the Senate, with Democrats blocking a GOP agenda with the tacit support of a few Republicans.’

Source: Vox

‘A comprehensive study looking at more than 500 species of primates finds that most are declining in numbers and nearly two-thirds face extinction…’

Source: Pacific Standard

And (I can’t resist): humans may be joining the list of endangered primates after electing the Orange Menace.

“This was the worst call by far,” the Whiner in Chief told Australian PM Turnbull.

Source: The Washington Post

‘Imbolc, (pronounced “IM-bulk” or “EM-bowlk”), also called Oimealg, (“IM-mol’g), by the Druids, is the festival of the lactating sheep. It is derived from the Gaelic word “oimelc” which means “ewes milk”. Herd animals have either given birth to the first offspring of the year or their wombs are swollen and the milk of life is flowing into their teats and udders. It is the time of Blessing of the seeds and consecration of agricultural tools. It marks the center point of the dark half of the year. It is the festival of the Maiden, for from this day to March 21st, it is her season to prepare for growth and renewal. Brighid’s snake emerges from the womb of the Earth Mother to test the weather, (the origin of Ground Hog Day), and in many places the first Crocus flowers began to spring forth from the frozen earth.

The Maiden is honored, as the Bride, on this Sabbat. Straw Brideo’gas (corn dollies) are created from oat or wheat straw and placed in baskets with white flower bedding. Young girls then carry the Brideo’gas door to door, and gifts are bestowed upon the image from each household. Afterwards at the traditional feast, the older women make special acorn wands for the dollies to hold, and in the morning the ashes in the hearth are examined to see if the magic wands left marks as a good omen. Brighid’s Crosses are fashioned from wheat stalks and exchanged as symbols of protection and prosperity in the coming year. Home hearth fires are put out and re-lit, and a besom is place by the front door to symbolize sweeping out the old and welcoming the new. Candles are lit and placed in each room of the house to honor the re-birth of the Sun.

Another traditional symbol of Imbolc is the plough. In some areas, this is the first day of ploughing in preparation of the first planting of crops. A decorated plough is dragged from door to door, with costumed children following asking for food, drinks, or money. Should they be refused, the household is paid back by having its front garden ploughed up. In other areas, the plough is decorated and then Whiskey, the “water of life” is poured over it. Pieces of cheese and bread are left by the plough and in the newly turned furrows as offerings to the nature spirits. It is considered taboo to cut or pick plants during this time.

Various other names for this Greater Sabbat are Imbolgc Brigantia (Caledonni), Imbolic (Celtic), Disting (Teutonic, Feb 14th), Lupercus (Strega), St. Bridget’s Day (Christian), Candlemas, Candlelaria (Mexican), the Snowdrop Festival. The Festival of Lights, or the Feast of the Virgin. All Virgin and Maiden Goddesses are honored at this time.’

Source: Wiccan, Pagan and Witchcraft Holidays., Imbolc Lore

A former homeschooled far-right evangelical “Christofascist” described the grassroots movement hidden under our noses with a plan in the works for decades to take over American society and government. Something similar could have been written by a right winger talking about the hidden Jewish-banking conspiracy but somehow this has more of a ring of authenticity and, if it has any basis in reality, it is as scary as it gets. My strongest reaction is to feel a certain urgency about relocating outside the US.

The writer says that this plan for a Christofascist takeover had been in preparation since the emergence of evangelical conservatism in the 1970s. Early manifestations included the founding of organizations like Operation Rescue, the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, but perhaps most significantly (and insidiously) the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), whose purpose was to ensure that homeschooling was legal and prevent its regulation “so the children [they] trained would abe able to fly under the radar.” Children homeschooled by extremists of the religious right have been trained to fight what they refer to as the

“Culture Wars. It’s a loose and ambiguous term that basically means anything or anyone that doesn’t align with this very specific view of Christianity must not be allowed to continue…”

Specific agendas include reversal of legislation protecting reproductive rights and preventing discrimination based on race, gender identity and sexual preference. More generally, the aim is to facilitate laws legislating morality;   the  only way to control the legislative process is to prepare to infiltrate the government through the indoctrination of youth. Thus the emphasis on training in effective argument;  they were

‘taught critical thinking skills but given only a narrow view of what was acceptable to argue for. We were, after all, being trained to take over the country for Christ, literally. We knew how to perform logical gymnastics about abortion, Christianity and any evangelical talking point you could throw at us. When we showed up to city council, local political party meetings and tours of the Capitol we asked intelligent questions, were respectful and had a vested interest in how our local political machine ran. We impressed every government official and staff member with our questions, earnesty and demeanor. In short, we were sneaky and polite Trojan horses; we had an agenda. Yes, even as 15-year-olds. It was forcefully handed to us by the adults in our lives who had been preparing for this since before we were born.’

The Tea Party takeover of the Republican Party was the first significant public manifestation of this movement. Now, ‘Trump being elected is also part of the plan, although not Trump specifically; the true goal is Pence.’ Trump’s easy manipulability and ignorance, apathy, and ineptitude about policy allow Pence’s Trojan-horse covert Christofascist piggyback power grab. Trump will do ‘whatever the Right want him to do in order to keep power, allowing Pence to advance his agenda under the radar ‘while filling Congress with ever more evangelical conservative Republicans.’

Pence seems much less threatening than someone abrasive, terrifying and erratic like Trump but he has an insidious, consistent, proven record of working to legalize discrimination and acting against women and marginalized people. His presence in office emboldens the up-and-coming far Right children to further the Christofascist agenda for which they have been trained — “to take back the country for Christ” by outbreeding, outvoting and outactivating.

‘Every class, every event, every pastor or guest speaker reiterated this, choosing to risk the 501c3 status of their church to push their agenda. ‘

And Democrats never even notice the rightwing grassroots organizing where this arises, e.g. the vast network of homeschoolers ‘that HSLDA and others have given [the Republicans] to tap into as a source of free labor,’ for efforts including the Republican Get Out the Vote efforts. Republicans who want to remain in office cannot afford to hamper this effort and thus must maintain marked laxity in overseeing homeschooling. Homeschoolers “are loud, have time and can be activated with one email blast” from Christofascist organizers such as the HSLDA.

‘We are the secret no one knew about and it’s time to come to light. Homeschoolers are a huge reason for the evangelical conservative takeover we’ve seen over the last decade or so…’

Such religious extremists ‘believe it is their Christian duty to save the country from its secular ways in the name of religious freedom’ and believe that their agenda will save the country from destruction ordained by God for our ungodly ways.

‘While it looks like a bunch of backwoods hillbillies playing with guns to anyone outside, they are resilient and in it for the long haul. They want America to succeed, but in their America there isn’t room for anyone unlike them. There’s a reason Trump’s mantra stuck despite his deplorable behaviour. They think America was founded on conservative Protestant ideals because that’s what they’ve been fed, because that’s what aligns with their interpretation of the Bible and they will not go down without a fight…

They will not be won over with sit-downs and respectability politics. This kind of dogma cannot be reasoned with; it must be fought against. Trying to convince them to come to the other side is a waste of time unless they’ve already started on that journey themselves. The ones in power, actively harming our lives, are past this point. We can only fight back.’

Source: Autostraddle (via Barbara)

The left demands Senate Democratss fight Trump on Supreme Court.

‘Several prominent progressive organizations are demanding that the Democratic Party’s senators do whatever they can to block Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court. On Tuesday night, Trump picked Neil Gorsuch, 49, to fill the seat.

“As long as the president is in flagrant disregard for the basic underpinnings of our republic, it is no time to consider a Supreme Court nominee,” said Ben Wikler, the Washington director of MoveOn.org, in an interview. “The next election is a while away, but what Senate Democrats do here and over the next few months will be seared into the memory of every Democratic voter.”

The core of the progressive groups’ argument is that Senate Democrats have dramatically underestimated the scale and depth of their voters’ anger toward Trump’s administration. (Only one Senate Democrat, Oregon’s Jeff Merkley, has announced that he’ll filibuster Trump’s nominee.)

Dozens of Senate Democrats have cast votes for several controversial Trump nominees, including Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and CIA Director Mike Pompeo. That may be well within the norm for the Senate, and it is largely in line with how Senate Republicans treated President Obama’s nominees. But organizers at MoveOn.org and Democracy for America argued that the Democratic Senate caucus needs to match the outrage of the progressive base by using every tool at its disposal to fight Trump — including opposing whomever the president names to the high bench…’

Source: Vox

Textbook shit-eating grin from the Mad King.

Trump quickly changed his mind on drug prices

Expect the same on Obamacare. Source: Vox

A leaked Trump order suggests he’s planning to deport more legal immigrants for using social services

Build a wall around public benefits, and make immigrants’ relatives pay for it. Source: Vox

We’re the lawyers suing “President” Trump: his business dealings violate the Constitution

He receives “emoluments” from foreign officials. Source: Vox

Trump isn’t an evil genius

And that’s not what matters anyway.

‘Whenever a reactionary populist regime takes power and begins doing illiberal things, the same question arises among its critics: How much of this is part of a master plan and how much is just flailing? What is the exact mix of incompetence and ill intent?

That argument is already taking shape around Trump, as he ham-handedly issues executive orders poorly understood by his own bureaucracy and fires members of his administration. It is aptly captured in two recent essays.

The first is by Yonatan Zunger, a Google privacy engineer. It’s called “Trial Balloon for a Coup?” and it reviews the news of the past day or two through the lens of a unifying theory: By putting confidant Steve Bannon on the National Security Council, cutting agencies out of rule-making, and defying a court order, Trump is systematically attempting to reduce any checks on his power. He’s trying to concentrate power in a small counsel of trusted advisers (the “coup”) and avoid legal review.

The second essay is by political scientist Tom Pepinsky, in response. It’s called “Weak and Incompetent Leaders act like Strong Leaders,” and it makes a simple point: The very same actions Zunger interprets as a devious, coordinated plan can also be interpreted as the bumbling, defensive moves of a weak leader who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing…’

Source: Vox

Neil Gorsuch, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, explained

‘Gorsuch is more outspoken and forthright in his positions than your typical Supreme Court aspirant, providing a lot of fodder for any opponents. A Democratic filibuster motivated by Republicans’ successful obstruction of President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, for this same seat last year is a certainty for any nominee, and if Democrats conclude that Gorsuch’s views on issues like the right to life and religious liberty are outside the mainstream, the filibuster might have a chance of success…’

Source: Vox

‘It won’t surprise you to learn American policing has a racism problem. It may surprise you to know that the FBI has been quietly, systematically investigating the white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement.

Alice Speri writes that there’s just not much anyone in politics is willing to do about it—and an inevitable conservative-led backlash when they try—but the FBI is starting to treat local cops the way it treated hippies: as a problem worth getting its hands dirty over…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘The Arab Spring six years ago first demonstrated social media’s ability to power political dissent. Now it’s reaching a new point of maturation. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Bernie Sanders all found ways to use social platforms to organize. In the course of those efforts and others, protesters have built a kind of plug-and-play network that makes it easy to generate widespread civil action with a click or tap. With this infrastructure in place, street protests could become as much a fixture of the new administration as President Trump’s tweets…’

Source: WIRED

#resist

‘So far, Trump has exclusively faced crises of his own creation, and he’s handled them disastrously. Americans of all stripes ought to worry about what’s going to happen when he faces a real one…’

Source: Matthew Yglesias, Vox

‘As Americans turn to George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) to better understand Donald Trump’s election, as we entertain the exciting possibility that we can read our way to some level of sensible public understanding, it’s time to suggest another classic 20th-century work, one that lends even deeper insight into Trump’s unlikely rise to power: Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957). Like Orwell, Barthes deals in language. Unlike Orwell, he deals in language to elucidate the subversive (and oppressive) power of myth.

Trump is more than a butcher of language. He is a builder of myths.Myths are not, in Barthes’ analysis, innocent origin stories. They are dangerous cultural distortions. They cleanse language of its history, and liberate words from their past, all in order to make a non-essential (and often ridiculous) connection seem essential. This somewhat mystical (myths are mysterious) transformation works by suggesting that certain fabricated phenomena are all natural (and, thus, all good) while hiding the cynical process of social construction behind their making. We build myths to prevent as many people as we can from asking questions about the hidden distortion that, inevitably, serves someone’s interest at the expense of truth, justice, and enlightened common sense…’

Source: Pacific Standard

‘Nation states cause some of our biggest problems, from civil war to climate inaction. Science suggests there are better ways to run a planet …’

Source: Debora MacKenzie, New Scientist

‘For those of you who haven’t taken in a history book in a while, President Andrew Jackson defied the Supreme Court and removed my ancestors, the Cherokee, from their lands and marched them to Oklahoma. “The Trail of Tears” was the result of a President openly defying the courts.

Just letting you know, there’s precedent for this President. And many of his followers consider themselves modern ‘Jacksonians.’ Best not get your hopes up for a judicial remedy. We are a nation of laws, but apparently the Constitution didn’t spec this division of power very well.

[I think we need to be putting pressure on Repubs in their jurisdictions, convincing them that letting this guy run wild is going to cost them dearly, instead of reacting to every executive order and tweet. He can ignore protests. His Repub pals can’t. Put thumbscrews on the enablers.] …’

Source: Garret Vreeland, dangerousmeta!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?sns=em&v=e3Tvclf3wp8

(thanks to Janet Y.)

‘Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity—substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment. The sooner Americans get used to these likelihoods, the better. …’

Source: Eliot A. Cohen, The Atlantic. Cohen is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative and former adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He minces no words about Trump’s outrages and about how bad it will get, but still maintains his faith that American values will survive the onslaught. A must-read in full. 

‘After reading these books, conservatives are hardly likely to rush out and volunteer to work for the Democratic Party. But they will end up a lot more humble. They’ll also have a far better understanding of why so many of their fellow citizens disagree with them — and on one or two issues, they might even change their minds.’

Source: Cass Sunstein, Bloomberg View

‘Having read these books, you might continue to believe that progressives are more often right than wrong, and that in general, the U.S. would be better off in the hands of Democrats than Republicans. But you’ll have a much better understanding of the counterarguments — and on an issue or two, and maybe more, you’ll probably end up joining those on what you once saw as “the other side.” ‘

Source: Cass Sunstein, Bloomberg View

‘Following Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s limp response to Trump’s “Muslim ban,” Lyft has decided to put its money where its mouth is. The ridesharing rival announced today that it will donate a million dollars to the ACLU to “defend our constitution.” …’

Source: Gizmodo

‘The first week of Trump’s Presidency was marked by an abundance of warnings amidst a flurry of executive orders that seemed designed to deliver on Trump’s campaign promises. The executive orders were often short on specifics and time will tell how many of the proposed policies are going to stick, but as has been the case so far – those hoping that somehow Trump will be tamed by the awesome power and responsibility of the office he now holds, are likely to be disappointed. In fact, the exact opposite is proving true – Trump is doubling down on even his most controversial policies. The wall is getting built, Muslims are getting banned, scientists are gagged.

While this may be pleasing to the most ardent of his supporters, the mood of the rest of the country swings between less optimistic caution and sheer abject depression. More than 3 million marchers filled American streets, the dystopian novel “1984” (written in 1949) becomes a best-selling book, and Nazi supporters are suddenly both more visible and getting punched in the face.

But no one has encapsulated the emotions of these early Trump days more dramatically than a group of scientists, who every year since 1947 determine whether to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock. This is a symbolic clock that is meant to indicate how close we are to nuclear war and global annihilation.  The scientists announced that the Doomsday clock has been moved 30 seconds closer to midnight specifically because of Trump’s election, going from 3 minutes away to 2.5. That’s the nearest the clock has been to midnight in 50+ years. We are talking the peak of the Cold War close. Why did the scientists, who include 15 Nobel laureates, move the clock’s hands?

Short answer – Donald Trump.’

Source: Big Think

The incomparable Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

‘…[T]he single most striking thing about his matchlessly strange first week is how primitive, atavistic, and uncomplicatedly brutal Trump’s brand of authoritarianism is turning out to be. We have to go back to “1984” because, in effect, we have to go back to 1948 to get the flavor.

There is nothing subtle about Trump’s behavior. He lies, he repeats the lie, and his listeners either cower in fear, stammer in disbelief, or try to see how they can turn the lie to their own benefit. Every continental wiseguy, from Žižek to Baudrillard, insisted that when they pulled the full totalitarian wool over our eyes next time, we wouldn’t even know it was happening. Not a bit of it. Trump’s lies, and his urge to tell them, are pure Big Brother crude, however oafish their articulation. They are not postmodern traps and temptations; they are primitive schoolyard taunts and threats.

The blind, blatant disregard for truth is offered without even the sugar-façade of sweetness of temper or equableness or entertainment—offered not with a sheen of condescending consensus but in an ancient tone of rage, vanity, and vengeance. Trump is pure raging authoritarian id.

And so, rereading Orwell, one is reminded of what Orwell got right about this kind of brute authoritarianism—and that was essentially that it rests on lies told so often, and so repeatedly, that fighting the lie becomes not simply more dangerous but more exhausting than repeating it. Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.

When Trump repeats the ridiculous story about the three million illegal voters—a story that no one who knows, that not a single White House “staffer,” not a single Republican congressman actually believes to be true—he does not really care if anyone believes it, even if, at some crazy level, he does, sort of. People aren’t meant to believe it; they’re meant to be intimidated by it. The lie is not a claim about specific facts; the lunacy is a deliberate challenge to the whole larger idea of sanity. Once a lie that big is in circulation, trying to reel the conversation back into the territory of rational argument becomes impossible…’

‘President Trump’s executive order closing the nation’s borders to refugees was put into immediate effect on Friday night. Refugees who were airborne on flights on the way to the United States when the order was signed were stopped and detained at airports.The detentions prompted legal challenges as lawyers representing two Iraqis held at Kennedy Airport filed a writ of habeas corpus early Saturday in the Eastern District of New York seeking to have their clients released. At the same time, they filed a motion for class certification, in an effort to represent all refugees and immigrants who they said were being unlawfully detained at ports of entry…’