State of Emergency

    President Trump is usurping the power of Congress when he decides to circumvent the latest budget appropriation which did not include full funding of a wall on the Mexican border.  If it was an emergency, why was there so much time to debate the issue in Congress.  An emergency is when there is no time for a  debate.  Trump is acting like a spoiled child  trying to get his way.  And worse for the country, he is acting like he was the absolute law and can ignore the Constitution.

 I am for secure borders and legal immigration.  A wall is symbolic of insularity, hostility and prejudice.  I much prefer the symbol of the last century the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor.

The only thing I fear more than our puffed up, strutting, reality tv star president is the opposition which has gone off the charts of all reality based thinking. 

Hey! Where's the Beef?

2/10/2019

Everything in biology is done with statistical analysis.  If you want to know if something is true you begin by gathering data and then analyzing the data to determine if what you have indicates something that could not happen by chance.  For example, if a gene seems to be associated with a particular disease an attempt will be made to take the observed correlation and subject it to a statistical test in order to determine the probability that the correlation could occur by chance.  Generally a probability of 5% or less of the numbers occurring by chance is required to be relatively certain of causality. 

I wonder if any aspect of hypothesis testing has ever been applied to a functional gene arising by chance even given millions of years, or to the spontaneous creation of life in a sea of chemicals, or of a functional gene or proto-gene appearing by chance in one individual, surviving and spreading through the population, or the probability that the gaps in the fossil record are simply a factor of having overlooked them.  If  there are, I have not heard of them.  The theory of evolution is the one area of biology exempt from genuine statistical analysis.

What color are People?

I object to the term 'people of color'.  In my youth 'colored people' were African Americans.  It is not a very good term. People of color is the same term but with an air of elitism attached to it.  In the victim mentality that promotes this term, it is assumed that dark skin color puts you in the oppressed class automatically and white skin puts you in the oppressor class.  The old communist doctrine of an oppressor class and an oppressed class has been transformed from a purely economic one to a purely racial one which groups people into two groups, white people, that is people of European descent, and every other kind of people, based solely on skin color.  

National Public Radio

I grew up on public radio and public television.  My mother, until it became impossible to stop us, only allowed us to watch "educational" tv when we were little.  Some of the most influential and memorable people in my life were public tv or radio personalities: Robert J. Lurtsema, (Morning Pro Musica, the best classical program ever), Maggie Letvin, (who, as a teenage boy, I found profoundly attractive), Julia Child, Fred Rogers, Don Herbert, (Mr. Wizard), the Brandeis historian Abram Sachar whose lectures and personal observations of history I will never forget, and more.  I don't remember that these people had any particular agenda to sell.  But not anymore.

Today's public radio constantly, and artfully pushes a liberal agenda.   There is no pretense of an unbiased approach.  I have not done it yet but I would guess that if you did a statistical sampling of npr topics they would roughly be divided into two groups: 1. people oppressed by the white male power structure: lgbtq people, people of 'color' and females and 2. the horror of the white male power structure, especially as embodied by Donald Trump.  And yet the majority of npr viewers are white and I would suspect that the majority of members of the board of directors are white, upper class males and females.  They are arrogant and self righteous about their values and beliefs.  Anthropogenic climate change and mutation and natural selection as a sufficient creative force, both controversial in much of America, are arrogantly taken as absolutes not to be questioned.

Also the quality of the programming has gone downhill.  NPR has adopted the mass market approach to radio programming filling it with chit-chat about the news and outrage over things they expect or want their audience to be outraged over.  They have become so predictable and banal that, even though they were once my go to for non chit chat, hot under the collar programming, I can no longer tolerate them.

Finally,  because they are and have been a highly respected and trusted news source for so long to a large and influential audience, they are the target vehicle for very sophisticated propaganda.   Non conventional political views are quickly shut down if expressed by callers.  NPR is a stalwart of the reigning paradigm of authority in our country much of which needs to be examined and questioned by journalists not promoted by them.

Our Institutions are Failing Us

The shooting in Florida this month reminds me again that our institutions are failing us.  The FBI was alerted, the police were alerted, multiple times, but nothing was done. Police on site failed to control the scene; with the shooter still unidentified and free students ran from the school in all directions while the police watched.

Recently Vladimir Putin announced the development of weapons systems that basically make half of our military obsolete.  Why did our intelligence agencies with their multi-billion dollar budgets fail to detect this?  If half of what he claimed is true, our aircraft carrier groups could not survive the first few weeks of a shooting war.  Our missile defenses also could not stop these weapons which can be fired from a multitude of locations, fly long range, fly at super high speeds and evade radar detection all the while homing in with nuclear or conventional warheads on a specific target.

Axis of Evil

I am thinking there should be a new axis of evil enshrined for America.  Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump conspiring to make America small again.  First Bush with his trillion dollar invasion of the Middle East.  That money was robbed from our economy and the economy of our future.  Add to that his expansion of Government with the so-called Department of Homeland Security.  Second we have Obama with his insidious increases in regulations over every area of our lives.  The idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant is absurd, but it provides an excuse for a raft of new regulations.  And his embrace of identity politics, a sure fire way to divide and diminish and something based on the ideas of victimhood, and blame assigned to artificially created identity groups.  Finally we have Trump who has blown the Federal deficit sky high and now is trying to trash the economy a la Smoot Hawley with tariffs on steel and aluminum.

It is time for the American people to demand major institutional change because our country is at risk.

Che Guevara

  Ernesto Guevara, Tambien Conocido como El Che by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

A Review

I just finished reading Paco Ignacio Taibo II’s biography of Che Guevara.    Che  kept a diary for most of his adult life which is the main source of information for the author.   If you are already a Che fan, there is plenty you will like about this book.  He is idealistic, committed, fearless, determined, brilliant, and charismatic.  If you are a critic or a foe, you will have to read into it the negatives.  The executions he directed or carried out himself are mentioned as being in the course of battle or of enemies whose crimes against the revolution were indisputable.  He is uncompromising, fanatical, self-centered.  These attributes are evident in this biography.  He is a dedicated communist and fiercely anti-American revolutionary who succeeded in planting in Cuba an economic system which could not function.  And he was determined to do the same in the Congo and throughout Latin America.  But he misjudged these country’s preparedness for revolution as well as the efficacy of communist economics.  He was in short a miss-guided fanatic who died in an ill-prepared armed invasion of a country that was not his own. 

There are many aspects of Che’s life that might have been mentioned in a book on his life but were not.  Nothing is mentioned about the events leading up to the Cuban revolution, or the history of Cuba, the history America’s relationship with Cuba or with Latin America in general.  No judgments are made or evaluations of the revolution or its resultant government or of the history that followed.  No evaluation is made of  Cuba’s tryst with the Soviet Union which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, which Che was prepared to see come about.   Taibo is one of my favorite authors and I now feel I know something about Ernesto Guevara de la Serna and the events in his life.  But I do not feel informed about the world he lived in.