Rejecting Science

In my Law and Policy classes, I discuss the influence of Enlightenment philosophy, with its emphasis on empirical inquiry and scientific discovery, on those who drafted America’s founding documents.

If there is any doubt that Americans have left those Enlightenment precepts far behind, the Age of Trump should dispel them. As Dorothy said to Toto, we aren’t in Kansas anymore.

Luddites occupy both ends of the political spectrum.

Does the scientific consensus about the existence and cause of climate change threaten the bottom line of the fossil fuel companies that make significant campaign contributions? Well, then, those on the Right “reinterpret” the evidence to show that settled science is wrong and must be dismissed.

Meanwhile, the Left’s suspicion of anything emanating from corporate America drives rejection of the scientific consensus that GMOs are simply a newer method of making the hybrids we’ve been eating for centuries and that widespread vaccination has saved millions of lives.

Our incoming President, of course, has never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t love, and he certainly doesn’t seem to have much interest in the numerous, genuine problems facing America’s Chief Executive. So I wasn’t really surprised by the Washington Post headline about a meeting between Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a proponent of a widely discredited theory that vaccines cause autism, said Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump asked him to chair a new commission on vaccines.

Hours later, however, a spokeswoman for Trump’s transition said that while Trump would like to create a commission on autism, no final decision had been made.

If Trump follows through, the stunning move would push up against established science, medicine and the government’s position on the issue. It comes after Trump — who has long been critical of vaccines — met at Trump Tower with Kennedy, who has spearheaded efforts to roll back child vaccination laws.

As the article points out, there is already a federal advisory committee on immunization composed of medical and public health experts — but as we have seen with his assertions that he knows more than “the Generals” and his contemptuous dismissal of uncongenial information from our national intelligence agencies, Trump believes he knows more than those “elitist” experts.

As an article in the New Yorker addressing Trump’s support for the “anti-vaxxer” movement  put it,

Asking Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to chair a commission on scientific integrity is like asking Ted Kaczynski to run the United States Postal Service.

In his Rolling Stone article, Kennedy wrote that vaccines exposed infants to a hundred and eighty-seven times the daily limit of ethyl mercury, as determined by the Environmental Protection Agency. If that were true, they would all have died immediately. Rolling Stone soon printed a correction—and then later corrected that correction. The actual figure was a hundred and eighty-seven micrograms, which is forty per cent higher than the levels recommended by the E.P.A. for methyl mercury (not ethyl mercury), and a tiny fraction of the figure cited in Kennedy’s paper.

I am no fan of Charles Krauthammer’s politics (to put it mildly), but he was trained as a doctor and is familiar with scientific evidence. He was appalled.

In a week packed with confirmation hearings and Russian hacking allegations, what was he doing meeting with Robert Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist pushing the thoroughly discredited idea that vaccines cause autism?…

Kennedy says that Trump asked him to chair a commission about vaccine safety. While denying that, the transition team does say that the commission idea remains open. Either way, the damage is done. The anti-vaccine fanatics seek any validation. This indirect endorsement from Trump is immensely harmful. Vaccination has prevented more childhood suffering and death than any other measure in history. With so many issues pressing, why even go there?

Conspiracy theories are embraced when people lack the information needed to evaluate their credibility. Civic literacy doesn’t require that citizens all be scientists–but it does require knowing the difference between a scientific theory and a wild-ass guess. It does require familiarity with the scientific method, and with the concept of falsification.

I think it was Neil DeGrasse Tyson who said “Science is true whether or not you believe in it.”  Rejecting reality is a prescription for disaster.

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ALEC’s Little Brother

Most readers of this blog know about ALEC–the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC is an arm of corporate America, and writes “model” legislation for lazy legislators (most of them beholden to those corporations for sizable campaign contributions) to introduce as their own. Once ALEC began to receive a good deal of public scrutiny, it began to bleed members, but it is by no means incapacitated.

Now, ALEC has a municipal-level sibling. 

American City County Exchange (ACCE) was spawned by ALEC in 2014 to spread ALEC’s ideas about “limited government, free markets, and federalism” down to the most local levels of government.

The linked report, from the Mayor of Fitchburg, Wisconsin, describes what he learned about the organization from a meeting he attended:

ALEC leaders intend to hire a membership/fundraising director and researcher in 2017 and make ACCE a profit center by 2018. This, presenters said, will require ACCE to solidify relationships with traditional allies, such as the bail-bond and telecommunications industries. ACCE must also find new allies, including those who would privatize historically municipal services, often by adding technology that is easily replicated but new to municipal clients.

For example, we heard presentations from “smart cities” vendors selling information and communications technology at the meeting, in a sales pitch format called a “workshop” by ALEC.

The priorities of ACCE, as one might expect, mirror those of ALEC: privatization of government functions, evisceration of public unions…the group is evidently working hard to expand both its membership and the number of corporate sponsors, but it is already cranking out cookie-cutter “model” ordinances intended to move local governments toward their goals.

Sometimes, just keeping track of the corporatists and crony capitalists is exhausting.

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If All Politics is Local

So yesterday, the President-Elect held what may have been the most surreal, embarrassing, childish such event ever held by someone preparing to assume that office. If there was any doubt about the need for resistance–the need to assure that this manifestly unqualified “man” and his collection of appalling cabinet choices do as little harm as possible–that display should have put it to rest.

So remember–local action can throw sand in the Orange One’s gears.

In the wake of the election, several cities have confirmed their intent to provide sanctuary to undocumented immigrants, in defiance of Trump’s threats to withhold billions in federal dollars.

Vox reports that Colorado is currently exploring how to keep an Obamacare marketplace open in a post-Obamacare era, continuing to use the technology the state built as a way to make shopping for insurance easier.

Jerry Brown has made it abundantly clear that California will continue to fight climate change. Aggressively.

Meanwhile, sites such as Resilience are actively encouraging what they call “anti-Fascist” organizing.

Policy innovation is already taking place at the municipal level. The practice of sanctuary cities is just one example. City governments in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Greater Boston, Chicago are increasingly funneling resources into worker-cooperative development, and devolving fiscal capacity to the community through participatory budgeting— both of which have also empowered undocumented immigrants in the policy realm as well as in their day-to-day economic well-being.

These developments are limited, even within the context of the cities themselves, but they can be pushed much further. The way for this to be done is through anti-fascist coalitions. In many of these cities there exists a smattering of progressive and even left-wing forces. This election has provided the sustained impetus for such groups to come together beyond the level of protest and contestation we have been seeing in recent weeks.

Although several of the suggestions in the Resilience article are framed in unnecessarily inflammatory rhetoric and somewhat “out there” (and in my own opinion, highly unrealistic), the emphasis on local action has much to recommend it.

It’s great that several blue states will resist the incoming Administration, but many of us  live in Red states, where it’s easy to get discouraged. If we live in urban areas of those Red States,however, we do have options.  If you look at the vote distribution in the Presidential election, it becomes abundantly clear that city-dwellers decisively rejected Trump and Trumpism .

Those of us who live in urban areas, surrounded by others who reject the racism, misogyny and xenophobia of the incoming Administration, who believe in science and environmental protection and endorse the moral and economic imperative of an adequate social safety net need to map out our counter-insurgency.

We need to decide what measures we can take at the municipal level to counter Washington’s likely retreat from governance. And then we need to work hard to implement those measures.

Bitching on Facebook is no substitute for face-to-face civic engagement.

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Outrage Overload

I’ve never been a fan of outrage. People who respond to every news item with righteous indignation at high decibels tend to have their arguments dismissed–they are viewed (correctly in my opinion) as predictable and (eventually) tiresome. (Remember the old story about the boy who cried wolf?)

Instead, I have always believed that “pick your battles” is sound advice, as is “don’t sweat the small stuff, and most stuff is small stuff.”

The incoming Trump Administration is going to test that thesis. Severely. Virtually everything Trump is doing is genuinely outrageous, and in saner times would be so far beyond the pale that we wouldn’t be discussing a Trump Administration.

Case in point (just one of literally hundreds, and far from the worst): This week, “Celebrity Apprentice” returned to NBC with Donald Trump as an executive producer of the show.

Ignore, for now, this addition to the daily evidence that Trump is far more concerned with celebrity than governance of the most powerful nation on earth. As one activist organization put it, “one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, Comcast/NBCUniversal, has, for all intents and purposes, a contractual arrangement with the president-elect of the United States.”

Can we spell conflict of interest?

Trust in all media is at rock-bottom levels, and this simply increases public disdain for and skepticism about so-called “mainstream news.” What credibility can NBC News, MSNBC and CNBC  retain, when they have a business agreement with a sitting President–a man they have an obligation to objectively monitor and investigate. How are Americans supposed to trust that their reporting on Trump is not compromised by the fact that they are doing business with him?

The problem is, this obviously improper behavior of both Trump and NBC comes in the midst of an absolute avalanche of corruption and incompetence. Several of Trump’s cabinet nominees are disasters-in-waiting. His collusion with Russia is now too obvious to ignore. He proposes policies likely to have dramatically horrible consequences that he quite clearly doesn’t begin to understand (Complexity-R-Not Us). He continues to pander to the white supremacists whose votes elected him. And I try not to think about the fact that this childish, mentally-ill narcissist will shortly be handed the nuclear codes…

Checks and balances? The ideologues, lapdogs and looters in Congress–many, if not most of whom were elected thanks to gerrymandering– show every sign of facilitating the Orange disaster.

If our national version of democracy is majority rule that respects minority rights, America is no longer a democracy.

At this point, the only way to retrieve government “by the people” is for “the people” to engage in a level of activism we haven’t seen in a very long time.

If outrage fuels such an uprising, I may modify my distaste for it.

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Has Mitch McConnell Killed Irony?

He certainly has breathed new life into the demonstration of hypocrisy….

Example #1: Readers of this blog need not be reminded that McConnell absolutely refused to even consider a  sitting President’s Supreme Court nominee –an unprecedented assault on constitutional norms. And yet, when Chuck Schumer threatened to return the favor (albeit with a caveat: the Democrats would not stonewall a moderate candidate, only a radical one), he proclaimed that “the American public” wouldn’t stand for such dastardly behavior.

Um…any mirrors in your house, Mitch?

Example #2: The Senate is preparing to schedule hearings on Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees. However, a number of them have not turned in the documentation required for the FBI’s background check, and the Office of Government Ethics has raised objections to the speed with which McConnell wants to proceed. (He is “pooh poohing” the Office’s insistence on complete documentation prior to going forward with the hearings.)

This sudden desire to accommodate a President-Elect is especially interesting in light of  a letter McConnell wrote to Harry Reid prior to hearings on President Obama’s nominees. In that letter–which recently surfaced–McConnell set out a list of demands that absolutely had to be met prior to the Senate giving any consideration to those nominees.

McConnell wrote that “we expect the following standards will be met:

  1. The FBI background check is complete and submitted to the committee in time for review prior to a hearing being noticed.
  2. The Office of Government Ethics letter is complete and submitted to the committee in time for review and prior to a committee hearing.
  3. Financial disclosure statements (and tax returns for applicable committees) are complete and submitted to the committee prior to a hearing being noticed.
  4. All committee questionnaires are complete and have been returned to the committee. A reasonable opportunity for follow-up questions has been afforded committee members, and nominees have answered, with sufficient time for review prior to a committee vote.
  5. The nominee is willing to have committee staff interviews, where that has been the practice.
  6. The nominee has had a hearing.
  7. The nominee agrees to courtesy visits with members when requested.
  8. The nominee has committed to cooperate with the Ranking Member on requests for information and transparency.

There’s more, but you get the idea.

Now, I really have no objection to any of these requirements; I think they are appropriate. Evidently, Mitch McConnell (aka “turtle man”) also thought they were appropriate–when the nominations were being made by a Democratic President.

Suddenly, they are no longer necessary safeguards to protect American citizens from malfeasance or worse. (I’m sure the fact that McConnell’s wife is one of those nominees has nothing to do with this 180 degree change…)

How does this disgusting excuse for a human being sleep at night?

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