Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump prides himself for being in office when the US military and its Muslim allies in Iraq and Syria polished off the phony “caliphate” of ISIS or ISIL. When the US military tracked down the ersatz “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and he detonated his suicide vest, Trump crowed, “Terrorists who […]
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science
Elon Musk may have been Joking, but the Flaky Theory that Aliens built the Pyramids is Faintly Racist
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Egyptian scientists and archeologists replied in a level-headed but firm way to billionaire Elon Musk’s tweet that aliens built the pyramids. It isn’t clear whether Musk was just joking around, though he sometimes talks about the possibility that advanced aliens are watching us, and thinks it statistically possible that alien […]
Dangerous Delusions: Top 3 Reasons Trump/ Navarro are trying to Kneecap Dr. Fauci on Coronavirus Policy
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump has sidelined Dr. Anthony Fauci again, and sent his assassin, trade adviser Peter Navarro out to attack him in USA Today. (Trump denies that he was behind the hit job, but organized crime bosses always blame their subordinates for the violence they decree.) It is said that Trump is […]
Trump vs Fauci? Undermining Science for Cult of Personality Politics is Taking America Down
The Washington Post reports that Trump team is focused on undermining Dr. Fauci’s credibility, leading me to wonder how that should even be possible? The Post took it seriously though, suggesting to me that Americans have a serious problem with authority. No, I don’t mean Americans have a problem taking orders. Countless anti-maskers are very […]
Fundamentalist Pandemics: What Evangelicals and Khomeinists Could Learn From The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam
This essay by Juan Cole was originally published in Tomdispatch.com. See the original for a perceptive introductory essay by Tom Engelhardt. This spring, the novel coronavirus pandemic has raised the issue of the relationship between the blindest kind of religious faith and rational skepticism — this time in two countries that think of themselves as […]
Top 5 Reasons Trump’s West Wing May be Emerging as a Coronavirus Epicenter
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Jana Winter and Hunter Walker at Yahoo News broke the story that 11 Secret Service agents have tested positive for the coronavirus. Likely some of them served in the West Wing. This week it was revealed at that a US military valet who brought Trump food came down with the […]
The US is no Longer the World’s Science Leader: Trump Fiddled While South Korea, Germany, China Swung into Actions
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Historically, in hyper-crises, local and global systems can change fundamentally. Before the coronavirus pandemic hit first China and then the rest of the globe, the question of whether the American imperial era might be faltering was already on the table, amid that country’s endless wars and with the world’s most capricious […]
Why America’s anti-Science and Anti-Intellectual Attitudes doom it to Coronavirus “Pearl Harbor”
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The surgeon general, Jerome Adams, has announced that the coming week will see enormous numbers of coronavirus deaths and hospitalizations, calling it this generation’s “Pearl Harbor.” But while Pearl Harbor was a plot of far right wing Japanese generals to get the US fleet out of the way so they […]
Why the ‘herd immunity’ route to fighting coronavirus is unethical and potentially dangerous
By Arindam Basu | – As most of the world tries to suppress the coronavirus spread, some countries are going it alone – trying to manage the pandemic through so-called “herd immunity”. Herd immunity means letting a large number of people catch a disease, and hence develop immunity to it, to stop the virus spreading. […]
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