Sweating the sheets orange

At this point our "so-called 'president'" is in a full-blown panic, likely sweating the sheets orange at night, tossing & turning as he imagines Mueller's noose tightening around his flabby neck.

Traitor Trump

I just looked back eight months ago at the post on the election and thought I should update a few key facts. First, the numbers I used on 11/11/16 were not certified and were inaccurate. While certain takeaways about turnout are still true, the numbers used changed. For example, Hispanics had the lowest turnout of any demographic, just under 50%, which helped elect Traitor Trump.

Traitor? Yes. The last time I wrote, we were all listening to adamant denials of any meetings with any Russians, period. Yesterday we listened to Kushner try to explain why he left four separate Russian meetings off his security clearance forms. Back to the election numbers...

Here is the most important set of numbers:

Processing Prez Don the Con

I'm still just trying to absorb that we elected an orange reality TV star as our president. It just hasn't sunk in yet.

I could say what a million other people have said, but all I can take away from the reality of our election is that there is good news ahead. Before I get to that, look at the tale of the numbers with no spin or partisanship: Republicans barely, barely eeked out this win.

shitshow storms

Funny that I don't write on this blog for a year, then I write a post about Don the Con the day before the infamous "grab her pussy" tapes drop. Now the GOP is in open revolt, with 30 days to go, and with massive defections from their nominee. Enjoy the shitshow, folks!

election 2016

I voted for Bush twice and Obama twice. Spend more than five minutes reading through the material on this blog and you'll know in a hurry that I'm a liberal. How many people would even continue reading to find out what I think about this election? How many just shut down the minute you use a label like, "conservative" or "liberal" or "progressive"?

I want to say that I genuinely feel like this is not a normal election, and so serious reflection is called for. Our country is the greatest democracy the world has ever known. Democracy depends upon the citizens doing their civic duty and voting. Voting responsibly requires reflection and information.

Time and Chance

...happen to us all.

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Albert Einstein, 1955
quoted from a letter to Michael Besso's family after his death

Teaching Ignorance

Interesting piece in the NYT on trying to explain to students that science doesn't erase ignorance, it just creates new landscapes for it to exist:

The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask.

Of course not all ignorance is created equal. Not knowing the motions of the planets, or the root causes of our diseases, is fundamentally different than not knowing where life exists outside of our solar system, or the specific proteins involved in ALS.

Science is progressive in that future knowledge builds on erasing the ignorance of the past. The problems and breakthroughs we've made so far empower us to push ever onward in our pursuit of knowledge. We know we can do it again because we've done it before.

The progress science makes sometimes takes a circuitous route to improving our quality of life. The discovery of TDP-43 in ALS, for example, will not cure ALS overnight. As MLK once remarked, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Maybe the ignorance-erasing arc of science is long, but it bends constantly towards improving our lives.