Re: the cartoon here, a reader notes: The tide is slowly starting to turn against Trump. But I’m not holding my breath. It can spring back any minute.
Trying to imagine a mechanism by which this “springing back” can happen, but failing to come up with one.
Now it’s true that Trump will stop at nothing to achieve his aim of absolute power, so maybe I need a better and stronger imagination.
A war?
I’m happy to report that during my K-12 years (1960 – 1973), I never heard a teacher mention anything that could be construed as “patriotic.” For example, we learned U.S. history, but it was not twisted to imply that the United States was “the greatest country on Earth.”
There are strengths to that practice, like honesty and integrity.
It doesn’t produce “woke” graduates; it produces fair-minded young people who can think for themselves.
The irony here is that all Trump wanted was absolute power. Dividing the nation between educated/kind people and hateful morons was just a means to that end.
And, until recently, it appeared to be working. Then came the shutting of the government, prices, mental illness, and Epstein, and now he seems to be losing ground.
When we look back at the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, the dichotomy of science and religion actually made sense. The content of the Book of Genesis actually is in conflict with the theory of evolution.
As shown at left, however, 100 years later, this has gotten completely out of hand and has taken on comic proportions.
We all learned percentages in 6th grade (+/-), so we know that if you reduce a certain number by 100%, you have zero. It makes no sense to say that you’re going to reduce the price of a certain drug or grocery item by more than 100%.
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?
It appears that Elon Musk is serious about colonizing Mars. A few points to be considered, however, many of which have been noted by others:
• 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.
Many Americans are starting to feel like the lady whose observations we see at left.
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.
Psychologists have been saying that Trump has some sort of mental disorders for many years. But let’s rely on our own powers of observation for a moment.
Does he really seem any more mentally/emotionally disturbed today than when he came on the political scene ten years ago?
Does he lie more? Is he any less interested in learning about science, world affairs, or economics? Is he any crueler, or indifferent to human suffering?
Trump needs to go, for dozens of reasons, but not because of an unsubstantiated accusation that he has “dementia.”
I’m sure all this at left is true.
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.
This pic of Bill Nye reminds me of all the radio and television interviews I did when I was promoting my books a decade ago. I never asked too much about the audience demographics in advance; I just presumed they were tuning in to learn something about environmental science.
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.
