I haven’t endorsed many websites, in fact, I have hardly endorsed any. That is about to change.
The Fallacy Files is a website devoted to fallacies, explaining them, helping the reader to avoid them, and thoroughly documenting them in general. In addition to the main files, which describe almost all of the known fallacies used in logical and illogical argumentation as well as advertising, there is a weblog or “blog.”
Here is a quote from Jeremy Bentham, a justly famous philosopher, dates 1748-1842:
Without a popular assembly taking an effective part in the government and publishing its debates, and without free discussion through the medium of the press, there is no demand for fallacies. Fallacy is fraud; and fraud is useless when everything is done by force.
Source: Jeremy Bentham, Bentham’s Handbook of Political Fallacies (Apollo Editions, 1971), p. 246.
Jeremy Bentham is known as the father of utilitarianism, which can be succinctly described as, “The greatest good for the greatest number” or the philosophy of the Star Trek character Spock. John Stuart Mill (dates 1806-1873) was one of his best-known contemporaries; Mill was known as a philosopher and an early proponent of equal rights for women. Mill is also famous, forever fixed in my mind, as having said,
“That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”
and, most importantly,
“Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”
(All facts and quotes are from Wikipedia)
Go to tumblr to explain the phenomenon of the “odd behavior” I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago. There you will see many blogs that closely resemble the two who started to follow me, that I didn’t understand before, that is: “doggieselfies” and “catslivepics.”
These two blogs, and many others, are simply blogs by people who are mostly speechless. They can’t fill out their “About” pages because, either they have nothing to say, or they can’t say it. Instead, they prefer to post pictures of dogs and cats, respectively.
I am enlightened: there is nothing really odd about this behavior. They are just extreme examples of people who want to blog but don’t have words, only pictures. So I’m happy that they can read and like to read me, or at least they want to look at my occasional pictures/photographs. THereFore, I will post more pictures.
Here’s a subset of the web you’re sure to enjoy: webcomics, comics that are published on the world wide web, popularly known as the internet. XKCD is surely the most interesting and entertaining of these pictures with a few words thrown in. The very most significant of these is xkcd’s timeline of global climate change, which shows basically what we’re up against in climate and weather for the next few years.
Start with “The Mind of Dan”s blog entry for September 12, 2016, which reprints xkcd’s time series for the global climate change story; at the moment this is the next-to-last entry for the mind of dan, who apparently lives in .ca (Canada?) Dan’s motto is “It’s not enough to bash in heads, you have to bash in minds.” Dan’s mind is a good blog to explore if you have the time, but I want to emphasize xkcd, so you can just go straight to this xkcd entry for the hockey stick.
The take-away that I got from this graphic image is that temperatures were almost as warm as they are now during the “Holocene climate optimum” around 8000-2000 BCE (Before Common Era, previously known as Before Christ.) Unfortunately for us, the temperature is now somewhat warmer than it was then, and temps are rapidly rising above that optimum, way above.
For other fascinating and amusing comics, be sure to explore xkcd and “The Mind of Dan” before you continue on to other entertaining things– if you have time.
FBI Director James Comey has sent a letter today to the Select Committee on Intelligence as well as multiple other Committees of Congress disclosing the existence of additional emails that were apparently found on electronic devices belonging to Anthony Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin (who is one of Hillary Clinton’s major advisers.) Other sources say there may be over a thousand such emails.
The letter is quite vague, not to say opaque, and does not indicate whether these emails contain any material of relevance or significance, nor whether any are classified. Mr. Comey states that he does not know how long it will take to evaluate the emails.
This letter is irritatingly vague and inconclusive, but that did not stop Donald and his supporters from seizing on them as prima facie evidence that Hillary somehow committed a crime by not disclosing them previously.
The truth is that these emails may or may not contain anything of any significance. There is little doubt in partisan minds that this letter revealing existence of these emails is intended to harm Hillary’s campaign.
Unfortunately for the Republicans, most people have already made up their minds. To influence the election, such information should have been revealed at least a month or two earlier. It is almost certainly too late.
According to the New York Times, a review of all the public opinion polls has concluded that Hillary has a 92% chance of winning the election. There is little reason to doubt this conclusion, although no-one will be happy until the votes have been counted.
Exxon-Mobil May Be Going Down the Tubes
A new Huffington Post article explains that Exxon-Mobil is saddled with excessive debt because of mistakes they have made over the last few years, especially when the price of oil was over $100 a barrel. The huge oil company made erroneous bets on trying to tap extremely expensive oil in the Arctic, deep under the Gulf of Mexico, and in the tar sands of Canada– attempts which, even when successful, only made available oil which costs more than it is worth to pump. Now that oil is less than $50 a barrel and likely to remain so for some years, the company is wallowing in red ink. Recently, they lost their top credit rating at Standard and Poor’s, yet they increased their dividend by 2 cents the next day.
The article goes on to detail Exxon-Mobil’s legal fights, including investigations by some state attorneys general into the charge that the company tried to cover up its knowledge of fossil fuel’s role in exacerbating climate change. The company has also failed to invest in alternative energy sources and its CEO has mocked the green energy field.
In sum, Exxon-Mobil is in trouble. In fact, they may be headed the same way as the coal industry, which rates a mention in the article for the bankruptcies of four major coal companies on the heels of China’s 3.7% drop in coal use last year. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Clarence Thomas Groped Me, Says White Woman
A young lawyer says that in 1999, while she was setting the dinner table at Clarence Thomas’ house preparatory to a dinner party that he was hosting, he grabbed her by the buttocks and made suggestive comments. See this article on the Slate blog “Slatest” for further details.
Thomas naturally denied the accusation, as he could hardly be expected to admit to being a Donald wannabe. The woman’s three former room-mates and her ex-husband confirmed that she had told them privately about the incident at the time that it occurred, not making it a certainty but helping her credibility considerably.
Clarence Thomas is well-known for being the Supreme Court Justice who barely received confirmation from a bitterly divided Senate after Anita Hill made her famous allegations that he had sexually harassed her when she was one of his law clerks. What is not as widely known is that two other women stood ready to testify that they had been recipients of his attentions– but the Judiciary Committee recessed without bothering to call them to testify.
Naturally, Thomas has been the worst Supreme Court Justice in recent memory, failing to ask questions during oral arguments and voting reliably conservative and anti-civil rights in every case. There are no active movements to impeach him or force his resignation on grounds of incompetence.
Harry Hits the Road
quote from the above book, published in 2010 by Harry Hurt III:
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is,” Camus wrote. “The problem is to know whether this refusal can only lead to the destruction of himself and others, whether all rebellion must end in the justification of universal murder, or whether, on the contrary, without laying claim to an innocence that is impossible, it can discover the principle of reasonable culpability.”
NB: this was discovered as a result of the New York Times (NYT) article on “The 282 people Donald Trump has insulted on Twitter”– this quote from that article:
Harry Hurt IIIAUTHOR, “LOST TYCOON: THE MANY LIVES OF DONALD J. TRUMP”
In the past few days, I was informed by email that two different “bloggers” were following my “blog.” They are “doggies that take selfies” or doggieselfies and catslivepics. Both have “About” pages that are just stubs and both have rather generic looking pictures, the first of dogs and their owners and the second just of cats. No text entries. Both blogs have a significant number of pictures, but as I said, those pictures could have come from anywhere.
There are some other “followers” who are somewhat sketchy but this is the first time I have noticed that the blogs of these “followers” are extremely sketchy. What is this? Possibly an advertising effort by wordpress itself, I don’t know. Any ideas?
Here is a personal note about the charges for my spinal surgery: I received a Medicare Explanation of Benefits (EOB) form a few days ago that listed a number of charges from University of California San Francisco. The amount that the hospital charged altogether, not including surgeon’s fees, was $770, 000 approximately. This includes $256,000 for the spinal implant (two titanium rods and screws) and $119,537 for the operating room. In addition, there was a $2264 fee for two units of blood which were administered to me; the blood itself is not charged, but processing, typing and cross-matching was charged.
These fees, which are known as “book” charges, are only charged to patients with no insurance; insurance companies pay only a small percentage of these amounts.
I have complained about astronomical medical prices in the past, so I have little more to say. It just shocks me more when I see it applied to my personal situation.
The Washington Post published an article on Friday about ten former nuclear launch control officers who have signed an open letter stating that Donald should not be trusted with the keys to command the launch of nuclear ballistic missiles and airplanes carrying nuclear weapons. The “keys” referred to are the emergency systems that allow the President (and a few others) to command launching a nuclear war in the last extremity when all other systems have failed, for example when a first strike by enemy powers (originally the Soviet Union) has disabled our command-and-control apparatus. That pretty well sums up the story, and no other “former nuclear launch control officers” have come forward to support Donald.
Just to be certain that you don’t think I am letting Hillary off lightly: after thirty or more years of Judicial Watch lawsuits and other unwanted scrutiny by the “vast right wing conspiracy”, no one has been able to indict Hillary for anything. Her husband Bill lost his law license over the impeachment and had a heart attack which probably ended his ability to sexually harass anyone, but Hillary is still hanging in there.
Hillary’s most recent problems, the Wikileaks disclosures of her hacked emails, have been trivial in comparison to Donald’s peccadillos. Wikileaks has had some emails published, but they have not been the “smoking guns” that they have hoped for. Everything they have disclosed is either ambiguous, distorted, or completely unfounded. There is a possibility that they are saving something really nasty for the last few days of the campaign, but we will have to wait to see if they can come up with anything worse.
