LongTomH

LongTomH's Journal

January 8, 2017

Beware of Mike Pence's Dominionism

I know that many on DU are hoping that Trump may impeached or perhaps Section 4 of the 25th Amendment may be invoked:

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

Section 4 [link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#1987:_Reagan.27s_alleged_incapacity|]was almost invoked late in Reagan's last term when it became apparent that Ronnie was losing it. If either route is taken to remove Trump from office, we still aren't out of the woods; we still have to deal with Mike Pence.

Pence has been labeled a Dominionist. Dominionism may be defined as:

Dominionism is the theocratic idea that regardless of theological camp, means, or timetable, God has called conservative Christians to exercise dominion over society by taking control of political and cultural institutions. The term describes a broad tendency across a wide swath of American Christianity. People who embrace this idea are referred to as dominionists. Although Chip Berlet, then of Political Research Associates, and I defined and popularized the term for many in the 1990s, in fact it had (along with the term dominion theology) been in use by both evangelical proponents and critics for many years.

Prominent dominionists in the Republican party include Rick Perry, Michelle Bachman, Ted Cruz, and Mike Pence.

Pence has been labeled a dominionist numerous times; a Google search on "Mike Pence dominionist" will turn up numerous articles, including this one by Jeremy Scahill: Mike Pence Will Be the Most Powerful Christian Supremacist in US History:

THE ELECTION OF Donald Trump has sent shockwaves through the souls of compassionate, humane people across the country and the world. Horror that a candidate who ran on a platform of open bigotry, threats against immigrants and Muslims, and blatant misogyny will soon be president is now sinking in. Trump appointed a white nationalist, Steve Bannon, as chief White House strategist — which was promptly celebrated by the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan. Bannon and other possible extremist Trump appointees, such as John Bolton, a neocon who believes the U.S. should “bomb Iran,” and the authoritarian Rudy Giuliani, are now receiving much deserved public scrutiny.

The incoming vice president, Mike Pence, has not elicited the same reaction, instead often painted as the reasonable adult on the ticket, a “counterbalance” to Trump and a “bridge to the establishment.” However, there is every reason to regard him as, if anything, even more terrifying than the president-elect.

Pence’s ascent to the second most powerful position in the U.S. government is a tremendous coup for the radical religious right. Pence — and his fellow Christian supremacist militants — would not have been able to win the White House on their own. For them, Donald Trump was a godsend. “This may not be our preferred candidate, but that doesn’t mean it may not be God’s candidate to do something that we don’t see,” said David Barton, a prominent Christian-right activist and president of Wall Builders, an organization dedicated to making the U.S. government enforce “biblical values.” In June, Barton prophesied: “We may look back in a few years and say, ‘Wow, [Trump] really did some things that none of us expected.’”

Trump is a Trojan horse for a cabal of vicious zealots who have long craved an extremist Christian theocracy, and Pence is one of its most prized warriors. With Republican control of the House and Senate and the prospect of dramatically and decisively tilting the balance of the Supreme Court to the far right, the incoming administration will have a real shot at bringing the fire and brimstone of the second coming to Washington.

“The enemy, to them, is secularism. They want a God-led government. That’s the only legitimate government,” contends Jeff Sharlet, author of two books on the radical religious right, including “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.” “So when they speak of business, they’re speaking not of something separate from God, but they’re speaking of what, in Mike Pence’s circles, would be called biblical capitalism, the idea that this economic system is God-ordained.”

Yeah, I know, Trump is a Trojan Horse for the Russians; but, he's also a Trojan Horse for the religious right! Even if Trump isn't removed from office, Pence is likely to be "the power behind the throne," like Dick Cheney. Trump's son, Don Jr., has said that Pence will be in charge of "domestic and foreign policy," while Trump would focus on the vague mission of “Making America Great Again.”"

November 19, 2016

I listened as they called my President........

Author unknown - courtesy Morris King and Facebook:

I listened as they called my President a Muslim.
I listened as they called him and his family a pack of monkeys.
I listened as they said he wasn't born here.
I watched as they blocked every single path to progress that they could.
I saw the pictures of him as Hitler.
I watched them shut down the government and hurt the entire nation twice.
I watched them turn their backs on every opportunity to open worthwhile dialog.
I watched them say that they would not even listen to any choice for Supreme Court no matter who the nominee was.
I listened as they openly said that they will oppose him at every turn.
I watched as they did just that.
I listened.
I watched.
I paid attention.
Now, I'm being called on to be tolerant.
To move forward.
To denounce protesters.
To "Get over it."
To accept this...
I will not.
I will do my part to make sure this great American mistake becomes the embarrassing footnote of our history that it deserves to be.
I will do this as quickly as possible every chance I get.
I will do my part to limit the damage that this man can do to my country.
I will watch his every move and point out every single mistake and misdeed in a loud and proud voice.
I will let you know in a loud voice every time this man backs away from a promise he made to them.
Them. The people who voted for him.
The ones who sold their souls and prayed for him to win.
I will do this so that they never forget.
And they will hear me.
They will see it in my eyes when I look at them.
They will hear it in my voice when I talk to them.
They will know that I know who they are.
They will know that I know what they are.
Do not call for my tolerance. I've tolerated all I can.
Now it's their turn to tolerate ridicule.
Be aware, make no mistake about it, every single thing that goes wrong in our country from this day
forward is now Trump's fault just as much as they thought it was Obama's.
I find it unreasonable for them to expect from me what they were entirely unwilling to give."

August 19, 2016

Trump's VP pick is a "young Earth" creationist as well as a climate change denier.

Bad Astronomer Phil Plait lowers the boom on Mike Pence, Herr Drumpf's choice for Vice President, who is playing to the evangelical right as well as the big oil and coal lobby:

I’ve written a word or two about Donald Trump, as you might imagine, but not much on his vice presidential pick, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (except to say, unshockingly, that he is a climate change denier).

You know anyone picked by Trump to be his running mate almost certainly will have a problem with established science, of course, but it turns out Pence is also a young Earth creationist. And one with a lot of conviction about it, too. In 2002, while a congressman from Indiana, he gave a short speech on the floor of Congress denying evolution, and used quite a few misleading, if not outright false, claims.

Phil offers this video of Pence making a fool of himself on the floor of Congress, then goes on to debunk his dumber statements:

Phil sums up:

I feel that at the very least, a vice presidential candidate should uphold the Constitution, especially the First Amendment.

Not that Trump appears to have any desire to want to, either. That makes them quite the pair. I hope that come November, they can be unemployed together.

July 29, 2016

Stephen Hawking questions our attitudes toward wealth and the role they played in Brexit

Guardian UK: Our attitude toward wealth played a crucial role in Brexit. We need a rethink. There are some interesting parallels in Prof. Hawking's article and the issues that Bernie Sanders raised during the US campaign.

Does money matter? Does wealth make us rich any more? These might seem like odd questions for a physicist to try to answer, but Britain’s referendum decision is a reminder that everything is connected and that if we wish to understand the fundamental nature of the universe, we’d be very foolish to ignore the role that wealth does and doesn’t play in our society.

..........//snip

Here's the 'meat' of the article:

So I would be the last person to decry the significance of money. However, although wealth has played an important practical role in my life, I have of course had a different relationship with it to most people. Paying for my care as a severely disabled man, and my work, is crucial; the acquisition of possessions is not. I don’t know what I would do with a racehorse, or indeed a Ferrari, even if I could afford one. So I have come to see money as a facilitator, as a means to an end – whether it is for ideas, or health, or security – but never as an end in itself.

Interestingly this attitude, for a long time seen as the predictable eccentricity of a Cambridge academic, is now more widely shared. People are starting to question the value of pure wealth. Is knowledge or experience more important than money? Can possessions stand in the way of fulfilment? Can we truly own anything, or are we just transient custodians?

These questions are leading to a shift in behaviour which, in turn, is inspiring some groundbreaking new enterprises and ideas. These are termed “cathedral projects”, the modern equivalent of the grand church buildings, constructed as part of humanity’s attempt to bridge heaven and Earth. These ideas are started by one generation with the hope a future generation will take up these challenges.

I hope and believe that people will embrace more of this cathedral thinking for the future, as they have done in the past, because we are in perilous times. Our planet and the human race face multiple challenges. These challenges are global and serious – climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans. Such pressing issues will require us to collaborate, all of us, with a shared vision and cooperative endeavour to ensure that humanity can survive. We will need to adapt, rethink, refocus and change some of our fundamental assumptions about what we mean by wealth, by possessions, by mine and yours. Just like children, we will have to learn to share.

If we fail then the forces that contributed to Brexit, the envy and isolationism not just in the UK but around the world that spring from not sharing, of cultures driven by a narrow definition of wealth and a failure to divide it more fairly, both within nations and across national borders, will strengthen. If that were to happen, I would not be optimistic about the long-term outlook for our species.

In many ways, this is a continuation of Hawking's concern about the dangers than human stupidity and greed pose to our survival.

July 17, 2016

Why did Jimmy Carter save the space shuttle

There are a lot of backstories to the development of America's only spaceplane (to date); one of the most interesting is: Why did Jimmy Carter, who was no great fan of man in space save the space shuttle program? The excellent Ars Technica blog has an article on this: A Cold War mystery: Why did Jimmy Carter save the space shuttle?.

We’d been chatting for the better part of two hours when Chris Kraft’s eyes suddenly brightened. “Hey,” he said, “Here’s a story I’ll bet you never heard.” Kraft, the man who had written flight rules for NASA at the dawn of US spaceflight and supervised the Apollo program, had invited me to his home south of Houston for one of our periodic talks about space policy and space history. As we sat in recliners upstairs, in a den overlooking the Bay Oaks Country Club, Kraft told me about a time the space shuttle almost got canceled.

It was the late 1970s, when Kraft directed the Johnson Space Center, the home of the space shuttle program. At the time, the winged vehicle had progressed deep into a development phase that started in 1971. Because the program had not received enough money to cover development costs, some aspects of the vehicle (such as its thermal protective tiles) were delayed into future budget cycles. In another budget trick, NASA committed $158 million in fiscal year 1979 funds for work done during the previous fiscal year.

The article goes into the various funding problems faced by the space shuttle program by the late 70s, during the Carter administration; the upshot is that Carter finally supported the program.

Armed with these bleak options, Frosch returned to Washington. Some time later he would meet with Carter, not expecting a positive response, as the president had never been a great friend to the space program. But Carter, according to Kraft, had just returned from Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Vienna, and he had spoken with the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, about how the United States was going to be able to fly the shuttle over Moscow continuously to ensure they were compliant with the agreements.

So when Frosch went to the White House to meet with the president and said NASA didn’t have the money to finish the space shuttle, the administrator got a response he did not expect: “How much do you need?”

In doing so, Jimmy Carter saved the space shuttle, Kraft believes. Without supplementals for fiscal year 1979 and 1980, the shuttle would never have flown, at least not as the iconic vehicle that would eventually fly 135 missions and 355 individual fliers into space. It took some flights as high as 400 miles above the planet before retiring five years ago this week. “That was the first supplemental NASA had ever asked for,” Kraft said. “And we got that money from Jimmy Carter.”

These few paragraphs vastly oversimplify the story; but, it does seem that without the need for the shuttle's use in verifying the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, it might very well have been canceled.

Then there was Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, who in 1972 had called the space shuttle a “senseless extravaganza.” A senator from Minnesota at the time, Mondale had vigorously opposed early funding measures to begin development of the shuttle. His views exemplified those who believed the United States had more pressing needs for its money than chasing the stars.

If Walter Mondale had won the presidency in 1984, the shuttle program would likely have been canceled after the Challenger disaster and NASA's budget gutted.

There's much more to the story, I recommend the article: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/a-cold-war-mystery-why-did-jimmy-carter-save-the-space-shuttle/

July 4, 2016

Did GOP denial of science set the state for Donald Trump?

There are a lot of reasons for the rise of Donald Trump: a dysfunctional, "if-it-bleeds-it-leads" media,and a generally pissed off electorate that feels it has been ignored and betrayed by the establishments of both parties. Astronomer Phil Plait, of Bad Astronomy fame, feels that GOP opposition to science and critical thinking played a major role: The GOP's Denial of Science Primed Them For the Illogic of Donald Trump:

We are awash in that miasma, where people can say almost anything, no matter how ridiculous, and not be confronted, not be challenged. Many of these purveyors of poppycock wind up surrounding themselves with throngs of people willing and eager to suspend their disbelief and support the foolishness. Cults certainly can form in such an atmosphere … and when the person spouting the nonsense is a politician, that’s when things get very sticky indeed.

And now here we are, with Donald Trump the nearly inevitable champion of the Republican Party.

This is no coincidence. An interesting if infuriating article in New Republic very clearly lays out how the GOP has spent decades paving the road for Trump by attacking the science that goes against their prejudicial ideology. I strongly urge you to read it, but one section jumped out at me in particular:

There’s another factor at work here: The anti-intellectualism that has been a mainstay of the conservative movement for decades also makes its members easy marks. After all, if you are taught to believe that the reigning scientific consensuses on evolution and climate change are lies, then you will lack the elementary logical skills that will set your alarm bells ringing when you hear a flim-flam artist like Trump. The Republican “war on science” is also a war on the intellectual habits needed to detect lies.

At the end of the article, Phil gives a list of his posts on critical thinking.

June 22, 2016

The Magic of the Summer Solstice

From Huffington Post: Stunning Photos From Around the World Show the Power of the Summer Solstice:

If you peered up into the sky at any point on Monday, you likely would have seen a big, beautiful full moon shining down at you. The June full moon, nicknamed the “Strawberry Moon” by indigenous American tribes, fell on the summer solstice this year — the first time the two coincided since the 1967 Summer of Love.

Summer solstice is the longest day of the year, and it’s one of celebration and reverence for many around the world, including some Pagans, Druids, Incans, and spiritual seekers. Celebrations typically honor the power of the sun, but this year, the full moon also showed off its glory by lighting the sky long into the night.

A full moon behind Glastonbury Tor near Somerset, UK

The full moon rises behind above the ancient marble Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion, southeast of Athens.

Aymara indigenous hold up their hands to receive the first rays of sunlight in a New Year’s ritual in the ruins of the ancient city Tiwanaku, Bolivia, early Tuesday, June 21, 2016.

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Photos of revelers at Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain in southern England, Britain June 21, 2016.

Israelis gather to watch the sunrise on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, at Rujum el-Hiri located in the central part of the Golan Heights on June 21, 2016.

June 21, 2016

Cpl. Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan Was An American Soldier

...and a Muslim, who died for this country!

This picture of Elsheba Khan mourning at her son's grave has, deservedly, gone viral:

May 14, 2016

Crazy Bernie -AD | Bernie Sanders vs Trump

May 3, 2016

New Paradigms for SETI: Cosmic Archeology

The Centauri Dreams website has run several recent posts on the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence that suggest new directions for the search. The most recent: Perspectives on Cosmic Archeology discusses the implications of the final factor in the Drake Equation: The lifetime of a technological civilization.

By ‘technological,’ Drake was referring to those civilizations that were capable of producing detectable signals; i.e., releasing electromagnetic radiation into space. And when we have but one civilization to work with as example, we’re hard pressed to know what this factor is. This is where Adam Frank (University of Rochester) and Woodruff Sullivan (University of Washington, Seattle) come into the picture. In a new paper in Astrobiology, the researchers argue that there are other ways of addressing the ‘lifetime’ question.

What Came Before Us

The idea is to calculate how unlikely our advanced civilization would be if none has ever arisen before us. In other words, Frank and Sullivan want to put a lower limit on the probability that technological species have, at any time in the past, evolved elsewhere than on Earth. Here’s how their paper describes this quest:

Standard astrobiological discussions of intelligent life focus on how many technological species currently exist with which we might communicate (Vakoch and Dowd, 2015). But rather than asking whether we are now alone, we ask whether we are the only technological species that has ever arisen. Such an approach allows us to set limits on what might be called the ‘‘cosmic archaeological question’’: How often in the history of the Universe has evolution ever led to a technological species, whether short- or long-lived? As we shall show, providing constraints on an answer to this question has profound philosophical and practical implications.

.............//snip

The paper is short and interesting; I commend it to you. The result it produces is that human civilization can be considered unique in the cosmos only if the odds of a civilization developing are less than one part in 10 to the 22nd power. Frank and Sullivan call this the ‘pessimism’ line. If the probability of a technological civilization developing is greater than this standard, then we can assume civilizations have formed before us at some time in the universe’s history.

And yes, this is a tiny number — one in ten billion trillion. Frank says in this University of Rochester news release that he believes it implies technology-producing species have evolved before us. Even if the chances of civilization arising were one in a trillion, there would be about ten billion civilizations in the observable universe since the first one arose. As for our own galaxy, another civilization is likely to have appeared at some point in its history if the odds against it evolving on any one habitable planet are better than one in 60 billion.

.............//snip

I always appreciate work that frames an issue in a new perspective, which is what Frank and Sullivan’s paper does. We can’t know whether there are other civilizations currently active in our galaxy, but it appears that the odds favor their having arisen at some time in the past. In fact, these numbers show us that we are almost certainly not the first technological civilization to have emerged. Is the galaxy filled with the ruins of civilizations that were unable to survive, or is it a place where some cultures have mastered the art of keeping themselves alive?

As a commentary on that last paragraph, I'd like to offer Randall Munroe's famed statement:

That sentiment has been shared by Prof. Steven Hawking, as well as the late Dr. Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke.

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