Science and Religion

As shown at left, however, 100 years later, this has gotten completely out of hand and has taken on comic proportions.

As shown at left, however, 100 years later, this has gotten completely out of hand and has taken on comic proportions.

What makes Trump’s lack of command of 6th grade math so pathetic actually isn’t that he doesn’t understand this, it’s that he keeps repeating the same mistake month after month.
This is what his top aides have been saying since early in his first term: he has no interest in understanding and learning the truth.
If you asked him today which wars he stopped, he’d still include Armenia and Cambodia, which are 4000 miles apart, and are not hostile to one another in the slightest. Do you think one of his people hasn’t tried to explain this to him?

• If it’s feasible to colonize Mars, it’s feasible to fix the Earth. (Apparently came from Neil DeGrasse Tyson.)
• Wherever we go in the universe, we need a sustainable culture. We’re actually fairly close to achieving that right here.
• If we tax the multibillionaires and apply the funds to things like decarbonizing our energy and transportation sectors, we’d be even closer.
• Transporting people and materials to Mars would be incredibly difficult and expensive.
• There’s essentially nothing on Mars conducive to supporting human life, in terms of water, atmosphere, temperature, and soil.
• Even if none of the above were true, all we would be accomplishing would be exporting human frailties (greed, tribalism, cruelty, cognitive biases, etc.) elsewhere in the solar system. We wouldn’t have gained a thing.

Exactly how this moves forward from here is anyone’s guess. Maybe the Democrats gain a huge majority in Congress in 2026 and then impeach and convict Trump–perhaps joined by lots of Republicans.
There are plenty of different scenarios.

But almost all these home remedies were popular before the 20th Century, and, since then, science has kicked in, and global life expectancies have increased from about 30 to about 70.
Causation here? Maybe.
Is there corruption in the pharmaceutical industry? Of course.
Would I like to be fighting cancer with dandelion juice? I don’t think so.

All that went fine — until it didn’t — and a guy started screaming into his phone and calling me a “cockroach” because of my position that climate change posed a real threat to our civilization.
Here, Nye walks into the lion’s den. Of course, that’s his brand.

Most Americans don’t support wanton criminality, which could be why Trump’s approval rating is 33% and continues to plunge.

The popularity of shopping malls has been falling over the last couple of decades, exacerbated by e-commerce and finally COVID-19, which had a crippling effect on top of America’s falling affinity for this type of shopping experience.
Making Trump’s claim even less supportable is the fact that the crime rate in Chicago is not rising. An AI overview:
Chicago’s overall crime rate is higher than the U.S. average, with a total crime rate of 4,012.2 per 100,000 people and a violent crime rate of 539.8 per 100,000 people. However, recent data from November 2025 show significant decreases in violent crime, including a 24% drop in homicides and shootings, and a 41% drop in robberies compared to the same period in 2024. The city’s violent crime rate has increased over the past decade, largely driven by increases in vehicle thefts and assaults, although some reports show an overall decrease in violent crime for 2023 and 2024.
Even through the barrage of nonstop lies, Trump somehow manages to maintain the support of 33% of American voters. It’s hard to imagine how this is possible.

Are greenhouse gas emissions making it harder to reflect the energy from incoming solar radiation back into space? Yes. There are crackpots who claim otherwise, but this theory, called “anthropogenic global warming (AGW)”, is as universally accepted among climate scientists as the theory of evolution is among biologists.
That said, we’re constantly learning more about the pace with which all this is happening. As an example, we keep improving our capacity to look inside massive glaciers to assess their “health.”
Moving on with the subject above, here’s an AI summary of “thermohaline circulation” of which the Gulf Stream is a major part:
Thermohaline circulation is a global, slow-moving current system in the ocean driven by differences in water temperature (thermo) and salinity (haline), which affect density. It functions as a large-scale “ocean conveyor belt” that redistributes heat from the equator to the poles, delivers oxygen to the deep ocean, and plays a vital role in regulating global climate.
How far are we from disrupting this entire system? I don’t think anybody really knows.