Lying to your face

My last post was about how reluctant I am to post about politics.  So, predictably, this post is about: politics.

I've been watching the unfolding humanitarian disaster in Puerto Rico with something akin to horror. Not just for the suffering of the people -- which is considerable -- but for the callous indifference with which Donald Trump is addressing the situation.  First responders have said that the extent of devastation is unknown at this time, but we do know that 95% of the island is still without power, almost 60% without potable water, and 72% without access to telephone service.  San Juan's mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, appealed to the federal government for help, and what did Trump do?

Chide the Puerto Ricans for "wanting everything to be done for them."  Point out how far in debt they are.    Pat himself on the back for his "fantastic response" to the disaster.

Others -- most others, in fact -- were not nearly so complimentary.  General Russel Honoré, who headed up President Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, was scathing.  "The mayor's living on a cot, and I hope the President has a good day of golf," Honoré said.  "The President has shown again he don't give a damn about poor people.  He doesn't give a damn about people of color.  And that SOB that rides around in Air Force One is denying services needed by the people of Puerto Rico.  I hate to say it that way but there's no other way to say it."

All of which brings up something I've mentioned before; Donald Trump lies every time he opens his mouth.  He has such a tenuous grasp on the truth that columnist Chris Cilizza has said that he's "living in an alternate universe."  Here are a few of the recent lies Trump has told, none of which he's backed down from:

• FEMA and the first responders in Puerto Rico engaged in a "massive food and water delivery."  The fact is -- and this has been confirmed by people there on site -- there's been no widespread distribution of food and water, because most of the roads are still impassable. 
• When Mayor Yulín Cruz said that what he'd said was flat out wrong, he lashed out at her, saying that evidently the "democrats had said you must be nasty to Trump."  Any contradictions between what he said and what's coming out of Puerto Rico are false, because the "press is treating him unfairly."
• His lies don't just center around the hurricane and Puerto Rico.  No, he's been lying for ages.  Another recent one centered around the proposed health care bill.  Trump said, more than once, that the Senate actually did have the votes to pass the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but there was "one senator who is in the hospital."  They didn't, and there wasn't.
• And, of course, there's been no meddling in anything by the Russians.  At a rally for Luther Strange, who lost his primary bid to take Jeff Sessions's seat in the Senate to the spectacularly right-wing Roy Moore, Trump said it was "... the Russian hoax.  One of the great hoaxes.  Are there any Russians in the audience?  I don't see any Russians."  This, despite the fact that the heads of the FBI, CIA, and NSA, and the former Director of National Intelligence, all agree that there is overwhelming evidence of Russian interference in the election.
• This pathological lying is not just by Trump himself, but by members of his administration.  Apropos of the proposed tax reform bill, Gary Cohn, director of the White House Economic Council, said, "The wealthy are not getting a tax cut under our plan."  Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin concurred, adding that the bill, if passed, would reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars.  Not to be outdone, Trump himself weighed in, saying that he wouldn't benefit at all personally from the bill.  Howard Gleckman, of the Tax Policy Center, says that all three of these are blatant lies.  "There is no plausible way Congress can fully fund all of the tax cuts in this outline while complying with its constraints on revenue-raisers," Gleckman writes.  "Businesses would receive the biggest tax cuts, which would ultimately benefit the highest income households... Tax cuts for corporations and, especially, pass-through businesses, would mostly benefit the highest-income households."  Of the benefit to the economy, Gleckman was unequivocal:  "Despite the president’s promises, it is implausible that this plan would permanently boost the economy.  Trillions of dollars in lost revenue would add to the federal debt, raise interest rates, and make it more costly for businesses to invest.  Those costs would offset the benefits of lower corporate tax rates and expensing."
• He said at a rally in Charlottesville that the U.S. had become a "net energy exporter for the first time ever just recently" -- implying, of course, that it was his policies that had caused this.  The problem is, the claim is flat-out false.  Politifact analyzed this statement from every angle they could think of, and no matter how you interpret it, it's wrong.  

And so on and so forth.  And yet... and yet... there are still people defending him.  Today I saw someone post that the well-deserved backlash Trump is receiving because of his petty, nasty, vindictive response to the Puerto Rico disaster is because "they always want to find a way to criticize the United States of America."  No, "they" (whoever "they" are) aren't criticizing the U.S., they're criticizing the President, who has once again shown himself to be a narcissistic asshole who takes any questioning of his words or actions as a personal assault.

Oh, and Puerto Rico is part of the United States of America.  Awkward, that.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So this brings us back to a place we've been before; at this point, defending Donald Trump is to side with a man who has zero respect for the truth, and lies continuously, apparently without any twinge of guilt.  He's warped people's attitude toward the media to the point that all he has to do is shriek "fake news" or "lying reporters" and they believe every word that comes out of his mouth (and disbelieve anything contrary that they see, hear, or read).

In short: supporting this man at this point is unconscionable.  I don't care what your political affiliation is, what race, what religion, or anything else.  If you are still in support of Donald Trump, you are putting yourself behind one of the worst people ever elected to public office in the United States.  And I honestly don't know how you can sleep at night.

Things going "boom"

One thing that seems to be a characteristic of Americans, especially American men, is their love of loud noises and blowing stuff up.

I share this odd fascination myself, although in the interest of honesty I must admit that it isn't to the extent of a lot of guys.  I like fireworks, and I can remember as a kid spending many hours messing with firecrackers, bottle rockets, Roman candles, and so on.  (For the record, yes, I still have all of my digits attached and in their original locations.)  I don't know if you heard about the mishap in San Diego back on the Fourth of July in 2012, where eighteen minutes worth of expensive fireworks all went off in about twenty seconds because of a computer screw-up.  It was caught on video (of course), and I think I've watched it maybe a dozen times.

Explosions never get old.  And for some people, they seem to be the answer to everything.

So I guess it's only natural that when hurricanes threaten, somebody comes up with the solution of shooting something at them.  The first crew of rocket scientists who thought this would be a swell idea just thought of firing away at the hurricane with ordinary guns, neglecting two very important facts:

1. Hurricanes, by definition, have extremely strong winds.
2. If you fling something into an extremely strong wind, it can get flung back at you.

This prompted news agencies to diagram what could happen if you fire a gun into a hurricane:

So this brings "pissing into the wind" to an entirely new level.

Not to be outdone, another bunch of nimrods came up with an even better (i.e. more violent, with bigger explosions) solution; when a hurricane heads toward the U.S., you nuke the fucker.

I'm not making this up.  Apparently enough people were suggesting, seriously, that the way to deal with Hurricane Irma was to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of it, that NOAA felt obliged to issue an official statement about why this would be a bad idea.

The person chosen to respond, probably by drawing the short straw, was staff meteorologist Chris Landsea.  Which brings up an important point; isn't "Landsea" the perfect name for a meteorologist?  I mean, with a surname like that, it's hard to think of what other field he could have gone into.  It reminds me of a dentist in my hometown when I was a kid, whose name was "Dr. Pulliam."  You have to wonder how many people end up in professions that match their names.  Like this guy:

And this candidate for District Attorney:

But I digress.

Anyhow, Chris Landsea was pretty unequivocal about using nukes to take out hurricanes.  "[A nuclear explosion] doesn't raise the barometric pressure after the shock has passed because barometric pressure in the atmosphere reflects the weight of the air above the ground," Landsea said.  "To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane, you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion tons for a twenty-kilometer-radius eye.  It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around."

And that's not the only problem.  An even bigger deal is that hurricanes are way more powerful than nuclear weapons, if you consider the energy expenditure.  "The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required," Landsea said.  "A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20 x 10^13 watts and converts less than ten per cent of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a ten-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every twenty minutes."

So yeah, you can shout "'Murika!" all you want, but Hurricane Irma could kick our ass.  It may not be a bad thing; a reality check about our actual place in the hierarchy of nature could remind us that we are,  honestly, way less powerful than nature.  An object lesson that the folks who think we can tinker around with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with impunity might want to keep in mind.

Apparently Landsea's statement generated another flurry of suggestions of nuking hurricanes as they develop, before they get superpowerful.  The general upshot is that when Landsea rained on their parade, these people shuffled their feet and said, "Awww, c'mon!  Can't we nuke anything?"  But NOAA was unequivocal on that point, too.  Nuking tropical depressions as they form wouldn't work not merely because only a small number of depressions become dangerous hurricanes, but because you're still dealing with an unpredictable natural force that isn't going to settle down just because you decided to bomb the shit out of it.

So there you are.  The latest suggestion for controlling the weather, from people who failed ninth grade Earth Science.  As for me, I've got to get going.  My classes are starting the chapter on basic chemistry today, and I need to get to school to see if I can swing a way to do a demonstration for my class called the "Barking Dog Reaction."  That's the ticket.  Things going boom.  I like it.

The different flavors of "why"

In my last few posts, we've been looking at some of the various reasons that people believe odd, counterfactual things.  We've looked at fear, wishful thinking, lack of knowledge, and being hoodwinked by fast-talking, plausible charlatans, each of which plays its role in drawing people into the ethereal realms of pseudoscience.

There's one more, though, that we haven't looked at; and that is the desperation people have to know why things happen.

Most folks are uncomfortable with the idea of chaos -- the thought that there are random forces at work in the world, that some things are simply the result of chaotic processes that we couldn't predict if we tried.  This idea was brilliantly investigated in Thornton Wilder's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which I can truly say is one of the few books that changed my life.  When I read it, in my Modern American Literature class when I was in 11th grade, I felt like my outlook on life would never be the same.

In it, Wilder's main character, Brother Juniper, an 18th century Franciscan monk, witnesses the collapse of a rope bridge in Peru.  Five people are on the bridge at the time, and all die.  He sets out to trace the history of the five victims, to see if there was some underlying reason why those five people, and no others, were killed.  And in the end, he realizes that if there was an explanation -- if god really did have a plan in engineering this situation -- it is so subtle that we could never know what it is.  And for this heresy, Brother Juniper and his book are both burned at the stake in the public square.

We always, somehow, want to know why.  And when science came along, there was a lot of hope that it would supplant religion in answering that question.  In some ways, it succeeded; but it didn't give people the answers to the "whys" that most were looking for, because there are different flavors of "why" -- and science is exceptionally good at answering one of them, and not so good at the other.

There are proximal "whys" and ultimate "whys," and the first is easy, and the second spectacularly difficult.  I saw a good example of the difference when, in an AP Biology class a few years ago, I asked, "Why are virtually all marsupials found in Australia?"

A student responded, in complete seriousness, "Because that's where they live."

Well, yes, but that's not what I was looking for.  I was looking for a deeper why -- an answer to the question of why marsupials had survived in Australia, but very few other places (the North American opossum being the sole counterexample).  And that's a difficult question, one that requires speculation.  Frequently questions of "ultimate why" either lead to unprovable guesses, or else are outside of the provenance of science to answer.

Which is why people have been turning to woo-woo craziness to explain the devastation that Typhoon Haiyan has wreaked upon the Philippines this past weekend.

Why did the typhoon form?  Why did it become so powerful?  Why did it take the path it did?  Science can explain how it formed, and give some answers to the proximal "whys," answers that involve steering currents and sea-surface temperatures.  But as far as the ultimate "why" -- why Haiyan devastated the city of Tacloban, why it struck where it did and not somewhere else -- science is silent.

So we're already seeing the nonsense rearing its ugly head.  Haiyan was created as part of a super-secret experiment by the US military, using a microwave burst.  It was sent on the path it took because the US was trying to divert radioactive water coming our way from Fukushima.  Even further out, we have loony evangelicals claiming that god sent Haiyan to devastate the mostly-Catholic Philippines in order to punish them for "worshiping idols."

It's not hard to see how some people see science as offering incomplete answers.  Because it does, honestly.  Whenever we're in the realm of "why" we have to be careful, as scientists, because the ultimate "whys" often don't admit easy explanation.  Even such simple "whys," often taught in elementary school science classes, as "why do giraffes have long necks?" are almost certainly oversimplified answers to questions that are much more difficult to answer than they would have appeared at first glance.

So no wonder some turn to other realms, where the answers to "whys" come hard and fast -- conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and (okay, I know I'm gonna get flak for this) religion.  Those models for understanding the world give the comfort of explaining why things happen -- sometimes, even the horrid things like illnesses, accidental deaths, personal losses... and typhoons.  Science is silent on the ultimate "whys," most of the time, and if you are uncomfortable with that, you either have to do what I do -- remain uncomfortable -- or leap outside of science.

Because, as Brother Juniper learned, if you don't make that leap, you just have to accept that sometimes the events in the world are subtle and unexplainable.