The Consequence of Matters

    The GOP has always treated science as a smorgasbord. Evolution is wrong because it contradicts Bronze Age superstitions, but nuclear physics is fine because it gives us bombs to make our dicks bigger. Well, except that radioactive decay part because it tells us the Earth is way older than 6000 years. See the part about the supremacy of Bronze Age superstitions. But all of that was of concern mainly to evangelicals. Even the Catholic Church made its peace with Darwin a long time ago. Things really accelerated when climate science became A Thing. What it said threatened some Very Big Money and, as Sinclair Lewis wrote in his book "How I Ran for Governor and Got Licked," it is hard to convince someone of the truth of something if their income depends on their believing the opposite. The GOP was forced to deny wider and wider swathes of physics and chemistry to maintain the fiction that it was just natural variations. Toward the end of the 1990...

It was on this night in 1967 that an uprising began in Detroit. An all-white squadron of police officers decided to raid an unlicensed after hours bar in a black neighborhood where there was a party to welcome home two recent veterans of the Vietnam War. The police stormed the bar, rounded up and arrested 85 black men and began loading them into vans. That touched off the 12th Street Riot, which raged for five days, though there was a long background of what you might expect from today -- a 97% white police force brutalizing black citizens. After the DPD left, the crowd began looting an adjacent clothing store. Shortly thereafter, full-scale looting began throughout the neighborhood. The Michigan State Police, Wayne County Sheriff's Department, and the Michigan Army National Guard were alerted, but because it was Sunday, it took hours for Police Commissioner Ray Girardin to assemble sufficient manpower. Meanwhile, witnesses described seeing a "carnival atmosphere" o...

Joe Lieberman had two major accomplishments as Senator. As the Senator from CIGNA, he refused to provide the 51st vote for the Affordable Care Act unless the idea of a public option was taken off the table. Much of the chaos Trump has been able to inject into health care depends on it being run exclusively through private companies. The other was creating the Department of Homeland Security. Lieberman pushed this, in the wake of 9/11, to show that he too is concerned about turrurism. It always struck me as a name that the Nazis would have come up with. George Bush opposed it as adding an unnecessary bureaucratic layer but was pressured to sign it into law. Lieberman's justification came from the 9/11 investigative committee's conclusion that al Qaeda was able to do what it did because of the failure of various Federal agencies to "connect the dots (and if I never hear that phrase again, it will be too soon)." But the agencies primarily responsible for the wobb...