FTLDS: Fact, Truth & Logic Deficit Syndrome

Trust me I’m a deranged crackpot and I have FTLDS

As we all know, we are experiencing an epidemic of FTLDS among the American people. One example is the president relying on a young promoter of reality-detached, socially divisive, crackpot conspiracies and lies. The New York Times writes that a couple of days ago the president retweeted 11 of the liar’s tweets:

“The tweets by Mr. Kirk, 26, who runs Turning Point USA, a conservative student group, hit just the right marks for the president. One tweet accused the World Health Organization of covering up the coronavirus outbreak, and upbraided Democrats for opposing the president’s decision to cut the group’s funding. Another claimed Democrats were appeasing Beijing and not doing enough to help Americans left jobless by the pandemic. A few covered some of the president’s longstanding grievances, such as the conviction of Roger Stone and claims of voter fraud. A well-worn conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden’s dealings with China even made an appearance. ..... In fact, Mr. Trump first introduced his more than 77 million Twitter followers to the phrase “China Virus” in a retweet of a post by Mr. Kirk on March 10 that linked two Trumpian obsessions: China and the border wall. “Now more than ever, we need the wall. With China Virus spreading across the globe, the U.S. stands a chance if we can control our borders,” Mr. Kirk wrote.” 

The far right conservative student group earned an unacceptably low fact accuracy rating, which I define as a Mixed or lower rating.

That the president of the USA has turned to a radical right crackpot conspiracy theorist and incoherent liar for socially divisive talking points is evidence of how bad the FTLDS epidemic has become. Fact, truth and sound reasoning[1] have been infected and destroyed by this virulent social pestilence. The damage it can cause is potentially catastrophic.

Unfortunately, there is no treatment or vaccine on the horizon because federal law free speech bars any meaningful attempts to treat the cause of the disease (lies, deceit, dark free speech) or at least reduce its severity. Lies and crackpot conspiracies cannot be taxed or impeded in any way and thus unvaccinated Americans are vulnerable to this heinous scourge.


Footnote:
1. Technically, humans do not use formal logic in their normal thinking. Instead they apply reasoning. Reasoning consists mostly of biased unconscious thinking and sometimes some usually biased conscious thinking. For politics, reasoning is usually more illogical than logical. Thus, the president's young new political strategist comments that building the wall on the Mexican border will control the pandemic is not an application of logic. He is applying biased reasoning to arrive at illogical and false beliefs and statements.

News and Truthiness...

I was looking at some old correspondence between me and my beloved uncle, who passed away about 5 years ago.  I sure miss him.  One of his question to me was: “Why is the truth not required when reporting the news?”  Here was my answer:

(Tap or click on pages to enlarge)

So let me ask you the same question(s):

 

-Why is actual truth not required when reporting news? 

-Do any of my answers especially hit home with you and/or can you add some more reasons to the list?

-Wouldn’t you always rather hear the actual truth, rather than spin?

Thanks for posting and recommending.

The WHO: Clarifying the Blame Game

The president and his Trump Party desperately want to shift all blame for their incompetence and long-standing anti-government ideology for the botched US response to the coronavirus pandemic. Part of the conservative-populist blame game is directed to, among other miscreants, the Chinese government, president Obama, the impeachment, democrats, and the World Health Organization (WHO). It helps to keep things in context and informed by facts and sound reasoning instead of partisan self-serving lies and bogus reasoning.

The WHO is dedicated to disseminating information about science-based truth about diseases and health conditions that plague the human condition. It is a critically important source of global information about epidemics. Its mission is not to allow politics to derail or dilute science that may be inconvenient for any political ideology, leader, tyrant, blowhard or movement. The WHO says this about its mission: “WHO works worldwide to promote health, keep the world safe, and serve the vulnerable. Our goal is to ensure that a billion more people have universal health coverage, to protect a billion more people from health emergencies, and provide a further billion people with better health and well-being.”

The US supports WHO to the tune of about $500 million/year, but the US legal obligation by treaty is closer to about $115 million. The president attacks the WHO as “very China-centric.” That has nothing to do with the failures of the president and his Trump Party enablers. The US was informed early on about the extreme seriousness of what was coming.

WHO’s China centricity 

The best propaganda often or usually contains a kernel of truth. That kernel is what demagogues, tyrants and kleptocrats always look for as something to exploit in their endless stream of dark free speech.

Unfortunately, the WHO has allowed Chinese and some other non-science to pass as science. Politics trumped science and that egregious mistake needs to be reversed. In the case of China’s traditional Chinese medicine, which is unproven ‘alternative’ medical treatments, the WHO stated that the goal of WHO policy “is to promote the safe and effective use of traditional medicine by regulating, researching and integrating traditional medicine products, practitioners and practice into health systems, where appropriate.”

An astoundingly anti-science article in Nature in 2018 approved of WHO quackery and wrote this lunacy about treatment of diabetes,

“The patient, who would probably be diagnosed as diabetic by a Western doctor, would probably be prescribed acupuncture, various tonics and moxibustion — in which practitioners burn herbs near the skin of the patient. Spinach tea, celery, soya beans and other ‘cooling’ foods would also be recommended.”

Moxibustion? Really? Yup really, but for breech babies, only close to the skin of the fifth toes of both feet.

The president’s attack on the WHO: Walking a tightrope

Thus, there is a kernel of truth in the president’s criticism of the WHO as too China-centric. The WHO’s acceptance of nonsense and acceptance of blatant quackery over science cannot be defended or rationally explained.[1]

That probably is the unspoken basis of the conservative American attack on the WHO. That said, it seems highly unlikely to me that conservatives or the president would directly state that directly. If they did say that WHO acceptance of Chinese quackery is proof of some sort of bad or evil China-centric bias, it would also be an implicit attack on the multi-billion dollar counterpart American quackery industry. This aspect of conservative attacks on the WHO in their desperate attempt to deflect blame from themselves and the president needs to be understood. Their central, years-long role in royally screwing up America's response to the coronavirus pandemic and the needless deaths has to be shielded by deflections, lies and whatever other dark free speech they think will work for them in the 2020 elections. Truth and honest free speech are not on their side.


Footnote:
1. People who believe in unproven traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and/or alternative treatments in the West (nutritional supplements, neutraceuticals, unapproved stem cell treatments, etc.) vehemently disagree that there is no rational explanation. Some of them point to lots of anecdotal evidence parading as proof and/or statistically significant evidence from the few existing reasonably sized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled clinical trials as proof of efficacy. In almost no case is a plausible mechanism of action for clinical benefit stated. And when a plausible mechanism of action posited, the supporting data is usually (~98% of the time) statistically weak.

Despite the counterevidence, they KNOW that such treatments are effective and not quackery. I've have many engagements with believers on this and find that, like politics, minds in disagreement are unchangeable. Their beliefs are no less sincere or firmly held than people who sincerely and firmly believe that the Earth is flat, the Moon landing was faked, vaccines are toxic and ineffective, the president is a good, honest and/or patriotic person going a good or great job, or that the Earth is ~6,000 - 10,000 years old according to infallible biblical calculations. The human mind is capable of firmly believing all sorts of things, mostly or completely true, mostly or completely false, ambiguous, not proven, not provable, nutty, bizarre and a perception of goodness in flat out evil.

David J. Halperin on why UFOs tell us more about life on Earth than outer space

(RNS) — When David J. Halperin was 13 years old and struggling with the very earthly reality that his mother was dying of heart failure, he became obsessed with the out-of-this-world phenomenon of UFOs. 

Now 72, and a retired professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Halperin never quite left behind a fascination with things in the heavens; he even wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the biblical prophet Ezekiel’s vision of a chariot blazing across the sky.

But in his latest book Halperin has returned formally to the role of UFOlogist. “Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO” was published last month by Stanford University Press.

Halperin long ago disavowed his teenage belief that UFOs actually exist. He now thinks of them as myths, but not in the sense that they are false or fake news. On the contrary, Halperin thinks they may contain deep and profound truths.

“Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO” by David J. Halperin. Courtesy image

Drawing on psychology, anthropology and history, the book examines why so many people have these experiences and what that might say about people as individuals, and about our culture and our species. He finds parallels between those who have claimed to experience UFOs and other common psychological phenomena.

He tells the story of Barney and Betty Hill, a mixed-race couple that was driving home one night in 1961 when, they believed, they were briefly abducted by aliens who came out of a pancake-like craft in the sky. Halperin examines the transcripts of the Hills under hypnosis, concluding that they were enacting the experience of the entrapment and enslavement of 18th-century African Americans.

“Jointly they’d shaped a modern myth that, like all true myths, was also primordial and timeless,” he writes. “They planted it, seedlike, in the collective psyche of their nation.”

Halperin, who also blogs on the subject, spoke to RNS about his book and the similarities between UFOs and religious phenomena. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

UFOs were a coping mechanism when you were a teen and your mother was dying. Why return to it now?

Because in some way or another, the problems, the issues that were raised by UFOs, guided me in my research for decades afterwards. This is my life’s story that I keep wrestling with.

Is the landscape of UFOs different today than when you were growing up? Is interest in UFOs as high today?

It seems to have changed since the 2016 elections. UFOs are now respectable in a way they never were when I was a kid. In 2017 The New York Times published a pair of articles, one on the Pentagon’s secret UFO program and the other on videos of odd objects that Navy pilots had taken back in 2004. The stories were interesting, but to me what was earth-shattering is that this was in The New York Times. One of the three names on the byline was Leslie Kean, the author of a bestselling UFO book from 2010. When I was a kid, the Times would not talk about UFOs except to look down its nose in contempt. Now it's flipped around.

My sense is that there’s a political subtext. There was a sympathetic article in New York Magazine in 2018 in which some wit wrote ‘Every generation gets the abduction fantasy it deserves. Ours is ET vs. Trump.’ I think that’s what’s going on here. UFOs are being embraced by the liberal media, those opposed to Trump. They are suddenly taken seriously by people who would not have given them the time of day.

When did you begin to doubt UFOs and instead to see them as myth?

Author David J. Halperin. Courtesy photo

I didn’t so much stop believing in UFOs, as I gave up the idea that there was a point in researching them. There’s no adequate method to study them, and, I thought, we’ll know it when they get in touch with us, and in the meantime, let’s do something more useful with our lives. Only gradually did my belief fade.

Then in 1970 I met Jacques Vallee (the UFOlogist and astronomer who served as the model for the French scientist in Steven Spielberg's film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"). He recognized that UFO sightings had a folklorish quality and yet they seemed to be real. They reflected the technology of their time.

This led me to reread (Carl) Jung’s 1958 book "Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies," which I had never understood. I realized that when Jung called UFOs a myth, he wasn't putting them down. He was stressing their importance. Now it started to make sense to me. Then I started doing research on Ezekiel's chariot, which is kind of like a UFO, for my  Ph.D.dissertation.

Why does sex turn up so much in alien abductions?

When I was a teen UFOlogist, we didn’t talk about that sort of thing. In the 1990s, when UFO abductions reached their zenith as a cultural phenomenon, the stories were shot through with sex. The UFOlogists explained that the space beings were doing research on our reproductive organs or that they were in the process of creating a mixed alien-human hybrid race that would rule the Earth.

I don’t find that even remotely plausible. I prefer to think that what’s reflected here is real experiences or fantasies that originally took place on a purely human plane.

Is alien abduction still a big deal for UFO enthusiasts?

UFO mythology is very complex. Our conventional image that someone looks up in the sky and there’s a silvery disk zooming overhead is just a small part of it. The belief in abductions has its germ in the early 1960s but then blossoms in the 1990s. It then fades as an important part of the mythology, while other parts that need not involve UFO sightings in the conventional sense, take its place, like "Men in Black," which plays out entirely on Earth.

There’s much more interest now in the alleged coverup of UFOs than in the objects themselves, possibly because that’s more amenable to investigation.  We might imagine that some WikiLeaks will produce a cache of memos saying, 'keep the UFOs secret.' The fact that WikiLeaks has never produced anything of the kind is part of my reason for thinking it doesn’t exist.

When did UFOs become a recognized phenomenon in the culture?

June 24, 1947. A private pilot named Kenneth Arnold was flying over the Cascade Mountains and saw nine silvery objects flying at terrific speeds. He described their motion as ‘like saucers skipping over water,' which the press turned into flying saucers. The term UFO, possibly originating with the military, first circulated in the 1950s and supplanted flying saucers in the 1970s.

Do you find that a lot of people who have UFO visions don’t have a traditional religious upbringing?

There’s certainly anecdotal evidence of that. Jung thought the UFO represents a reassertion of the yearning for spirituality that’s repressed and ignored in a material civilization. Whether you can demonstrate that non-anecdotally, with statistics, I don’t know. There are different kinds of entanglements between UFOlogy and religion. I don’t know how I would generalize that into a pattern. UFOs are about transcending boundaries.

What are you doing now with your interest in UFOlogy?

I’ve lost much of my taste for travel, so I don't go to UFO events. But last October, I blogged about "Storm Area 51" (a supposed raid of the top-secret U.S. Air Force base rumored to host alien spacecraft suggested by Facebook users that became a festival in Rachel, Nevada). The few thousand people there had a good time. Nobody stormed anything. Blacks and whites mingled. One woman talked about how she had a good conversation with someone wearing a MAGA hat. And I thought, UFOlogy can unify the country!

So what’s your thinking now about what UFOs are all about?

You asked when UFOs became a cultural phenomenon, and I answered June 24, 1947. But I left off the second half of the answer. June 1947 was also the month that the Doomsday Clock first appeared on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. I believe there’s a link. At its most basic, what the UFO is about is death — the ultimate alien but also the intimate alien. Because your death is an intimate part of you. But it’s the most alien thing you can possibly imagine, or struggle to imagine.

So it seems significant to me that UFOs became a cultural phenomenon when the possibility of the collective death of the species through nuclear warfare became real. It began to sink into people. It’s significant that it's enjoyed a tremendous resurgence since Donald Trump was elected, and the possibility of another collective death, through climate change, came a notch closer to reality. That has become something that haunts us.

What’s going to happen now that we have this foretaste of collective death with the coronavirus? Some things are already happening. Belgium has experienced its greatest wave of UFO sightings since 1990. We know what those UFOs are. They’re Starlink Satellite trains. But people are looking up, seeing peculiar lights and thinking “UFO.” In that sense, the cultural and psychological sense, they are UFOs. So where’s the UFO going to go now? Let's talk again in a year or five years and see.

https://religionnews.com/2020/04/17/david-j-halperin-explores-the-mythical-reality-of-ufos-in-new-book/

ADDED NOTE: GERMAINE likes intellectually stimulating books, so this should be right up his alley.

Nobody says it like Steve

To the envy of many of us, Steve Schmidt is a wordsmith… par excellence.  Or, to put it in the crude vernacular of the day, “he knows how to rip new ones,” and with surgical precision.  :-O  Steve calls himself a former Republican:

“29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of The Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life. Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.”

Yesterday, on Twitter, Steve let it all hang out:

Discontent with leading the most inept and lethal response to a life and death crisis in American history, Trump reached for a new low today by igniting what will soon be known as a “liberation movement.” The “Libbers” are here. A new chapter of crazy in American life is born(1)

Soon we will start to see repeats of the lunacy in Michigan and Ohio all over the country. Get ready for the noxious blend of Confederate flags, Semi-automatic weaponry, conspiracy theorists, political cultists, extremists and nut jobs coming to a state Capitol near you. (2)

They will be stoked by Trump every step of the way as they help make the air fertile for his blame gaming, scapegoating, evasions of responsibility, populist fulminations and nationalist incitement’s. They will be on TV every night storming the (3)

Battered ramparts of our politics and civics. Growing Food lines, skyrocketing unemployment, bankruptcies and the reality that PPP is too small and failing will metastasize within our toxic political culture. Americans are increasingly out of money and face ruin while Trumps (4)

Administration continues to lie, fumble and flounder. None of this had to be, but here it is, and it will get worse because Trump is unsteady. He is erratic, indecisive and incompetent at a stunning level. From his slovenly sartorial appearance and lack of physical fitness to (5)

His sloppy verbal meanderings, non sequiturs and dissembling Trump represents a confluence of nearly every repugnancy that can be listed on the catalogue of undesirable human traits that render leaders as unfit in moments of great crisis and testing. Tragedy has come to America (6)

It is so much worse for having come when America had the misfortune of being saddled with Donald Trump. He stands alone, triumphant in ignominy as the most hapless and incompetent leader the American people have ever seen in action. Recovery will take years. (7)

He is unfit to lead us out of the danger. His failure is epic. He is a clear and present danger to America’s future and our prosperity. 200 days until Election Day (8)

 Whoa.  That’s a slap-upside-the-head, and then some.  So, what do you think?

-Do you agree with Schmidt that soon "Libbers" will start popping up all over the country?

-Do you agree that the Republican Party is now the Party of Trump?

-Is America in worse trouble than we even think?  If yes, how so?

-And most important of all, will Trump get re-elected?  (Or, as I prefer to put it, “Are we really that stupid?”)

Thanks for posting and recommending.

Concepts in Politics: Liberty and Freedom

Liberty and freedom tend to be used interchangeably in political discourse, but they are not the same thing, at least according to some sources. Wikipedia describes the difference like this:

“Sometimes liberty is differentiated from freedom by using the word "freedom" primarily, if not exclusively, to mean the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do; and using the word "liberty" to mean the absence of arbitrary restraints, taking into account the rights of all involved. In this sense, the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and limited by the rights of others. ..... Liberty entails the responsible use of freedom under the rule of law without depriving anyone else of their freedom. Freedom is more broad in that it represents a total lack of restraint or the unrestrained ability to fulfill one's desires. For example, a person can have the freedom to murder, but not have the liberty to murder, as the latter example deprives others of their right not to be harmed. Liberty can be taken away as a form of punishment. In many countries, people can be deprived of their liberty if they are convicted of criminal acts.”

Thus liberty is constrained by the rule of law and to a lesser extent constraints that flow from things like social and tribal norms and loyalties. The concepts are important in politics because many people consider rule of law constraints to be unjustifiable or unconstitutional. Differences of opinion arise because both liberty and freedom are essentially contested concepts. They are not definable with universal authority and probably never will be. People will endlessly disagree about what is a proper liberty or freedom and what is not.

This is important because an ideology such as libertarianism leads many libertarians to believe that there are far too many burdens on individual freedoms that should never be subject to the rule of law. Some libertarians argue that many or most laws are illegal because they are unconstitutional. A sociologist who worked as a financial advisor for multi-millionaires and billionaires commented on how many of those people viewed the rule of law and thus the scope of their own liberties:

“The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it's almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. ..... About a quarter of the people I interviewed [financial advisors to billionaires] really seemed to believe quite unironically in the justice of protecting the wealth of their clients from taxation. They literally view taxation as theft, and they view government as incompetent at best and corrupt at worst. They are deeply suspicious of any sort of welfare state programs because they see it as destroying initiative.” 

A lot of those wealthy people cheat on their taxes with no qualms whatever about it.

With that kind of an anti-law mindset, it is easy to see how the urge to make government so small it can be drowned in a bathtub would be appealing. Of course, we are witnessing the downside of that attitude at work in the staggering incompetence and failures of our shrinking federal government to deal competently with the coronavirus pandemic. Before the current disaster is recovered from, that anti-government, unrestrained freedom attitude will cost the US economy and taxpayers trillions, maybe $10 trillion, maybe a lot more.

In a 1944 speech, federal judge Learned Hand commented on how he saw the liberty vs freedom difference, the danger of unrestrained freedom and how he struggled to define the undefinable concept of liberty:

“What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow. ..... What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; .....” 

That language expresses sentiments that are rarely voiced in modern political discourse. Among many conservative and populist Americans, the idea of weighing the interests of others along with personal interests without bias is probably seen as naive, goofy or maybe even immoral. That attitude is unfortunate. There is nothing naive, goofy or immoral about having some concern for one’s fellow citizens and people in general.

One can see the danger inherent in elevating the concept of freedom and/or liberty to a position that negates the rule of law and any other constraints that tend to impede the rise to power of demagogues, tyrants, plutocrats, oligarchs, kleptocrats, murderers, crooks and liars.

Spiderbait, Most Boys Suck