Jeff Schweitzer's Blog

That any voter would support Donald Trump to become leader of the free work seems beyond comprehension to many, a phenomenon outside the realm of understanding. That voters in the U.K. would approve a referendum to leave the EU seems perplexing given the chaotic and costly aftermath, clearly predictable prior to the vote. These distinct events, separated by a fierce ocean and centuries of culture, would at first appear to be unrelated or at best connected only through the reports from a homogenized global media. But Trump and Brexit are in fact one and the same thing, one coin with two sides, an orange head one on side and tails wagging the dog on the other.

In 1873 James Clerk Maxwell laid the foundation for modern physics when he proved that light and magnetism were not separate phenomena. Instead, Maxwell showed that what appeared to be two distinct things were actually two phases of one reality, electromagnetism.  Einstein said of this discovery: “This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.”

As with electromagnetism, Trump and Brexit are similarly two phases of the same state of matter, Brexitrump, the merging of what seems to be two into one. What we are experiencing is yet another, and more pernicious, “change in the conception of reality.” This time Einstein would be less enthusiastic.

A New Reality

Our earliest ancestors gazed at the night sky and in the random distribution of stars above saw the comforting order of constellations.  Today we look up and discern shapes of animals in the wispy condensation of clouds.  We breathlessly share on social media images of Jesus on burnt toast or the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich or Elvis as a potato chip.  Welcome to pareidolia, the human brain’s amazing ability to perceive patterns where there are none.

In the Beginning… 

We humans cannot turn off our instinct to see familiar shapes in the world around us; pareidolia means that our brains demand that there be order even when none exists.  And just as we abhor the absence of visual order, we too are unable to accept the unsettling idea of “I don’t know” when confronted with the disorder of the unfamiliar.  So we make up comforting answers to all that perplexes us, just as we create reassuring images from clouds and toast.  By making up answers to dull the sting of ignorance, we fool ourselves into thinking we explain the world, that we see design and significance – even in the absence of both.

Filling the Void

To put all of this in blunt and crude terms: we make shit up, and then insist the crap we just made up is true because we believe it.  So in the abyss of great uncertainty, our ancestors developed elaborate creation myths and gods of the sun rain and oceans to explain the mysteries and happenings of daily life.  War gods helped in victory, or not.  Fertility gods helped, or not.

Aching with this need to fill the void of the unknown, people across time and place all share a compelling quintet of yearning on which our early conceptions of reality were founded:  fear of death; the desire to explain away nature’s mystery; hopes for controlling one’s destiny; a longing for social cohesion; and the corrupting allure of power. These are the five pillars of religion.  Note that nowhere in that equation of religion’s foundation is a demand for reason, fact, or evidence to support one’s belief.  Instead, the religions we create demand that we simply believe through faith, as a means of self-justification.  Pareidolia predisposes us toward such folly.  A great leap it is not from seeing an image in a cloud to believing that the image is real.  We gladly believe, we desperately want to believe, in the god we created, in the images and answers we made up.  We do so in the absence of any objective supporting evidence because faith tautologically rejects the idea that such evidence is necessary.

Religion is like our appendix, a vestigial remnant from a primitive past.  Perhaps in a few millennia the god of Abraham will invoke the same curious amusement as rain and sun gods do today.  Or perhaps our god will simply be shelved along with Zeus and Jupiter.  Some day.  But until then, we suffer the consequences of a population that believes in the absence of evidence; and more curiously, rejects an objective reality that conflicts with beliefs easily proven false.  And this leads us to the politics of today.

In our rush to still the pang of ignorance, we confound faith and fact.  And so we get Brexitrump. Pareidolia rears its ugly head as we see things that are not there and are blinded to things that are.  Because faith demands no proof, people cling stubbornly to a belief in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence.  We see patterns because we want to; we reject what we dislike because faith allows that.  Faith trumps fact.  Reality is optional.  And that is what makes Brexit and Trump two phases of one thing – they each could only exist in the absence of a commonly understood and broadly accepted conception of an objective reality that is independent of our individual biases.

If we all agree the sky is blue, we have an opportunity based on that common understanding for discussing why it is blue, how it got that color, and what is the color’s significance. But if I insist the color is green, and you claim the color to be puce, both of us rejecting evidence to the contrary because we simply believe, then we have little common ground for any discussion at all. Brexitrump exists solely as a consequence of this type of willful ignorance and blind faith that together prevent reasonable dialogue based on a shared conception of reality.

Fiction, Faith and Fact 

The “change in the conception of reality” is not benign. Ignorance kills. In Africa, eight healthcare workers combating the Ebola epidemic were killed by an angry mob who believed the doctors and nurses were infecting people with the virus.  The population most in need of help murdered the only people who could provide assistance.  People acted against their own best interests because of an altered conception of reality. Facts and evidence were rejected as irrelevant.

As do those African villagers, some people vote for Trump or to leave the EU intoxicated by a conception of reality that does not correspond to any objective truth.  Without us being anchored together by a shared understanding of that objective truth, reality is an option to be rejected whenever the real world gives us something unpleasant.  As in Africa, this deadly ignorance is borne of unfounded fear and denials based in the irrational rejection of basic established fact.

When fiction becomes confused with fact, anything goes, freed from the constraints of reason. The conclusions from years of careful research, scrutinized by competing scientists and published in peer reviewed journals carry no more weight with the public than the random thoughts of a bloated pundit.  Talking heads with no training now have the same authority as highly qualified experts.  So global warming is dismissed as a liberal hoax in spite of a preponderance of scientific evidence.  Climate and weather are mistakenly thought to be the same so that with every winter storm comes the pathetic and childish denial that the world could not be getting hotter.  When presented with evidence, skeptics selectively demand more “proof” without understanding what that concept means in scientific inquiry.  Yet, with considerable irony, when we are not discussing climate change, many hold beliefs securely for which there is no proof at all, the flipside consequence of misunderstanding the scientific method.   The anti-vaccine movement demands no proof of the link to autism, which has been thoroughly discredited.  They simply believe.

This elevation of faith to fact, and confusing belief with evidence, has real consequences, and not just in remote villages in Africa.  Nowhere can that be seen more clearly than in conservative opposition to President Obama over the past seven years.  By untethering ties to reality, by claiming faith is sufficient proof of any belief, the GOP can with a straight face blame Obama for everything bad, no matter how far removed from Obama in reality; and give him credit for nothing good, independent of how directly his actions led to that good. No leap of logic or time or reason is too great for them to link Obama with something undesirable; and no cause and effect no matter how obvious or self-evident is too strong for them to dismiss, reject or ignore.  Facts do not matter.

The idea that the GOP has substituted faith for fact is easily enough proven.  Take any area of improvement:  lower unemployment, rising stock market, declining gas prices, an expanding economy, health care; and then ask any conservative friend if Obama can be credited for any of that.  When the inevitable answer is no, ask the following question:  is there any circumstance, any result, any area of improvement that can be attributed to Obama?  Elevated gas prices were his fault, but prices lowered in spite of him.  He was blamed for the declining stock market he inherited, but given no credit for a market that more than doubled during his tenure.  His economic policies were blamed for high unemployment but those same polices have nothing to do with rates falling below six percent.  What could Obama have done, what outcome could we have seen, for which a conservative would be willing to credit him?  The untenable but predictable answer is none, at least in the faith-based world of the right wing.

Brexitrump and Faith-based Promises

This hateful rejection of reality is the direct precursor to the rise of a demagogue like Trump. This rejection of fact as a basis for discussion leads to Brexit. No? Let’s look at the claim that “we send the EU £350 a week; let’s fund our NHS instead,” a campaign slogan that gained great traction. Never mind the claim is not even correct; but what now after the election? Less than 24 hours after the vote, the loudest proponent of that idea and head of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage, said that the promise was a “mistake.” Farage went on to say when asked if he could fulfill his promise to fund the NHS with money saved from leaving the EU, “No, I can’t, and never would have made that claim.” He repeatedly made that claim, and it was one of the campaigns most prominent ads. This surrealistic disconnect can only exist when our new conception of reality rejects truth as an annoyance.

Much of the “Leave” campaign was based on concerns about immigration. Those in favor of leaving the EU wanted to take control of immigration policy on the idea that by being in the EU Britain lost control of its borders. This influx of immigrants was said to result in loss of jobs, an increase in crime and a severe strain on social services. For many voters, leaving the EU was the means of solving these problems. Voters were given that very promise. But Tory MEP Daniel Hannan told BBC immediately after the vote that leaving the EU will not “automatically reduce immigration” which directly contradicts one of the central promises of the campaign. Explaining that there was going to be little or no change in immigration after the vote, Boris Johnson (a leader of the Leave movement) said that the UK was not “pulling up the drawbridge” and that “we cannot turn our backs on Europe.”

The two most important premises of the Leave vote were based on falsehoods. This is possible in a world in which facts no longer matter, in which the new conception of reality no longer requires facts or reason or proof or common sense, just faith that what we believe is true because we believe it. Maybe history will prove that leaving the EU was beneficial to the UK; but if so it will turn out to be so for none of the reasons promised.

We come to this deep divide of Brexitrump, this unbridgeable political chasm, because politicians no longer need to be constrained by a shared truth.  Facts are dismissed as irrelevant to the greater ideal of faith.  This slide away from an objective reality is the primary cause of extreme polarization and the rise of demagoguery because faith allows for the creation of an alternative universe in which an opponent is easily demonized by dismissing ameliorating facts.  A big leap it is not from believing in god and the devil, to believing in anything at all, including that the president is a radical Christian, but also a Muslim, and a foreign citizen socialist who will take your guns away, or that Trump could be president or that Brexit makes sense.  Facts don’t matter; we create a fictional order in the face of randomness and then call that real; and the chasm becomes ever wider.  Faith and ignorance are not benign, and become downright dangerous when confused with rationality.   Brexitrump is the consequence of this destructive confusion arising from the new fact-free conception of reality.

We live in an age of denial perpetuated by a political culture of ignorance that willfully embraces anti-intellectualism. There are consequences to this, including real and present threats to our national security.

Happy “400 Day”

The earth, and its human occupants, reached an important milestone last week. Carbon dioxide levels for the first time in hominid history surpassed 400 parts per million (ppm) as measured at Cape Grim in Tasmania. This southern hemisphere measurement is particularly interesting because unlike those made in the north, observations are not subject to large seasonal cycles, meaning we have reached this threshold everywhere in all seasons. Yet this story has barely been mentioned, if at all, in the media. That is like the captain of the Titanic neglecting to inform passengers that a large hole had developed in the ship’s hull. This is not a minor oversight.

A Warmer World

In 1800 prior to the industrial revolution carbon dioxide levels hovered around 280 ppm. Since 1850 rising carbon emissions have pushed global temperatures higher by about 1.5 degrees Celsius. Almost all models predict that the global climate will warm by at least 2 degrees once carbon dioxide levels reach 450 ppm. A global scientific consensus among more than 2000 of the world’s preeminent climatologists from 154 countries brought together by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has this 2 degree rise as a critical threshold. At this point we anticipate melting ice sheets, sea level rise, coastal erosion, shifts in food production and water availability, increase in the number and intensity of storms, more frequent and intense droughts and heat waves, more and more intense wildfires, expansion of tropical diseases into the north, and mass migrations unprecedented in human history.

The Hypocrisy of Denial

Donald Trump claims he “is not a big believer in global warming“ because the warnings are “a total hoax” and “bullshit” based on “pseudoscience.” Thus dismissing the knowledge, experience and data of those 2000 scientists from 154 countries. Yet this prominent denier has cited global warming and its impacts as the rationale for building a wall at his golf course in County Claire, Ireland. His permit application notes that erosion due to rising seas and extreme weather are a consequence of climate change – the reality of which he refutes. He cites as justification the very thing he dismisses as a hoax.

Trump is not alone in denying reality or in the hypocrisy involved in that denial. Every prominent leader of the GOP denies that climate change is real. Hypocritically these pols say they cannot accept that climate change is real with the phrase “I’m not a scientist“ but claim they know enough science to reject the scientific consensus. Oddly none say he is “not a doctor” when it comes to the abortion debate. The GOP remains the only major western political party in the world to deny the reality of climate change.

Every winter some silly wag or political hack laughs off global warming because it snows, thereby conflating climate and weather. With every snow storm newspaper editors across the country trot out the old and tired cartoon of the global warming group meeting canceled due to snow and ice. This confusion between local and global events is a consequence of ignorance. Arctic air will always be brutally cold even in the most extreme cases of global warming. Snow and ice will always be a winter reality. So stop already with the embarrassing nonsense that climate change can’t be real because it is cold outside. Nobody ever said climate change meant the end of winter. In fact most models predict some areas will experience an increase in intense snowfall during winter months followed by hotter and drier months in later seasons as the average global temperature rises.

Who Do You Trust – the DOD or Donald Trump?

The U.S. military is not waiting around for the deniers to get onboard. The GOP ostensibly supports a strong military focused on protecting our national security; yet denies one of the biggest threats to that security as identified by the very armed forces the GOP claims to support. The Military Advisory Board, not a hotbed of radical liberalism, enumerates the very real threats from global warming in their report, “National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change.” Perhaps rather than listen to Sarah Palin, who calls climate change “junk science“ and the “greatest scam in history” Trump and his fellow conservatives should read what the U.S. military has concluded:

“Climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water. These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale, and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time.”

But Donald Trump dismissed climate change as “pseudoscience.”

The Department of Defense concludes that,

“Coordinated and well-executed actions to limit heat-trapping gases and increase resilience to help prevent and protect against the worst projected climate change impacts are required — now.”

But Donald Trump is not a “big believer” in climate change.

The military’s National Security Strategy, made public in February 2015, states that:

The US Navy is particularly concerned about the national security threats of an ice-free Arctic, which is soon upon us. The Department of Defense report to Congress on “Arctic Operations and the Northwest Passage“ concludes that the “Arctic is warming on average twice as fast as the rest of the planet“ and that increased human activity in the region could lead to “competition for resources and boundary disputes that may result in conflict…“ With rising temperatures, the Navy now says that the Arctic will “give the U.S. its first new ocean to police since the annexation of the Pacific Northwest in 1846.”

But Donald Trump claims global warming is “bullshit.”

Who do you believe has a more accurate handle on reality, Donald Trump or the Department of Defense? These reports and conclusions are not the rantings of left wing extremists but from the very people and institutions in which Republicans put so much faith. If the GOP wishes to deny climate change they must deny any DOD funding requests for any effort to combat its consequences. If not they are nothing but Trump asking for permission to build a wall against a threat he denies exists. You cannot have it both ways even in this age of hyper-hypocrisy. You can accept the conclusions of the world’s climatologists and geologists and U.S. military, or you can choose to have Sarah Palin as your science guide, but you cannot do both.

The Consequences of Ignorance

Irrationality, scorn for the truth, contempt for science, and the warm embrace of willful ignorance are all direct and disturbing contributors to climate change denial, the anti-evolution movement – and Donald Trump. The rise of Donald Trump as a national candidate and the denial of global warming are inevitable consequences of a political culture that embraces anti-intellectualism as a virtue. The Donald as a candidate could not exist without the suspension of reason. Trump and a political culture hostile to science are symptoms of the same malady, a society sick with extremism borne from faith-based reasoning in a population incapable of making rational choices. Faith in the absence of evidence, or continued faith when presented with conclusive contrary proof an idea has failed, is no basis for reasonable dialogue. When beliefs are divorced from reality and objective truth anything goes; we lose the ability to have any meaningful discourse to solve our very real problems. We get Donald Trump instead. If we do not share a common version of reality we have no basis for any dialogue at all. We see this inability to address issues rationally in the debate about sane gun control, LGBT rights, abortion, vaccinations, GMOs, environmental protection, education, energy policy and national security. We see it in our struggle to promote public health because of partisan extremism and irrational opposition to Obamacare. We see this right at home in our widening butts and waistlines because we believe utter nonsense about diet and nutrition. We saw it when Sarah Palin erupted on the national scene as the nation’s first candidate obviously and clearly unqualified for office and we see it in the candidacy of Trump today.

Trump’s campaign highlights like few others could that we are in a race for the bottom, in which the candidate who best embraces ignorance and hate wins. When beliefs are divorced from reality, a hallmark of the Trump’s outrageous claims, nothing is off limits. With no common understanding of even baseline truths, we get proposals of pure fantasy to build border walls, deport 11 million people, kill the families of terrorists, identify Muslims and track their movements, and exclude them from our lands. We can close mosques. All without consequence. Reality and objective truths are no constraint.

We have never before witnessed so clearly the clash of reason and faith, science and religion, truth and the big lie, demagoguery and sane debate. Disdain for the scientific method is front and center in Republican philosophy. With faith-based reasoning politicians are not constrained by the annoying shackles of reality like the IPCC consensus on climate change. False statements about Planned Parenthood are taken at face value by party sympathizers even when easily shown to be false. Irrational fears are stoked about transgender bathrooms. With no grip on reality people believe that their guns are going to be taken away; that evolution is just a theory and therefore has no greater validity than creationism. Fighting evolution has become an integral part of the GOP fabric, a modern day version of the Church’s attacks on Galileo. Never mind that we can demonstrate evolution in a Petri dish; it has been proven across multiple fields of science including genetics, biogeography, and paleontology. Even the Pope in 1996 grudgingly admitted that evolution is “more than just a theory.” But the GOP hangs tightly to the fifteenth century on the precarious tendrils of faith immune to reason and fact. With no filter of rationality, Fox News becomes legitimate; and a clownish buffoon who denies global warming in the face of dire national security warnings from our own military can become a candidate for the presidency.

Unlike the pabulum of most campaign slogans, our future truly is at stake here as we cross the threshold of 400 ppm. That is real. For those Bernie Sanders supports who contemplate not voting for Hillary Clinton, hear this: you will “feel the Bern” – every day as the earths gets hotter and hotter. And to everybody else with the insane thought of voting for Trump: happy 400 day.

What we observe today with Donald Trump as a nominee, and Mitch McConnell obstructing our Constitution by blocking Obama’s candidate for the Supreme Court, is an echo of past times in which our country has seen the ugly side of ideological extremism. We can hark back to the earliest days of our republic to see deep rifts between political factions that formalized into parties battling for our future. Tribalism has always been with us.

In his 1796 farewell address, George Washington warned that the rise of Party politics that he was witnessing:

“…serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one party against another, foments occasional riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions….”

Warring Factions

Our Founding Fathers, who wished to create “not a system of party government under a constitution but rather a constitutional government that would check and control parties”, would be appalled at what modern American politics has become. Their greatest fears have become reality as a reality TV star is taken seriously as a presidential candidate.

Washington’s specific concern was the increasingly hostile polarization between the Federalists and the Democrat-Republicans (no relationship at all to today’s parties). The parallel to current events is enlightening for its similarities and differences.

At stake then were two vastly different views of how America’s future would unfold. Federalists, embodied in Alexander Hamilton, advocated for a strong central government capable of building a nation still in the vulnerable stage of infancy and protecting America’s growing business interests at home and abroad. Federalists wanted to strengthen ties to Britain. The Democrat-Republicans (anti-Federalists) championed by Thomas Jefferson, feared that a strong central government would return the new country to monarchy. The anti-Federalists pined more for an agrarian society than an industrial one, and wished to align the United States more with revolutionary France than with Britain.

Jefferson claimed the Federalists were for the “opulent” classes while he and his supporters were for “the mass of the people.”

This deep divide was one of Washington’s primary worries upon leaving office. In that same address of 1796, he further warned that political parties could:

“…become potent engines by which . . . unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”

Parallels and Differences

Can anybody read that warning from Washington about unprincipled men usurping the reins of government and not think of Donald Trump? Can anybody read those words from Jefferson about the “opulent class” and “mass of the people” and not think of the modern versions of the GOP and Democrats? But the parallels are not perfect by any means; and those differences are telling.

The biggest divergence between then and now is how the two sides view the role of central government. With the glaring exception of a large military, the party of big business today disdains big government. The GOP in simple terms supports the wealthy, with the idea that by doing so all sectors of society benefit. This is the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats. Low taxes, less regulation, small government, unfettered capitalism and laws favoring Wall Street over Main Street are all central to the modern Republican Party. This GOP is an offspring of Federalist Party (benefitting the “opulent class”), which ironically began as a means of promoting a strong central government, the antithesis of the GOP.

Democrats, the descendent of the anti-Federalists, again in simple terms, advocate for higher taxes on the rich, more regulation, social programs benefiting the poor, and an emphasis on social justice. With equal irony, the anti-Federalists today in the form of Democrats (“mass of the people”) advocate for a strong central government, the precise opposite of what Thomas Jefferson wanted for the country.

So, while the two sides have flip-flopped on the fundamental nature of states’ rights and role of the federal government, they have been consistent on the other foundational ideologies that can be simplified down to liberal and conservative. In the past, conservatives promoted a strong federal government and liberals advocated for dispersed federal power. The opposite is now true, but what attributes otherwise define liberal and conservative remain fairly constant.

This divide between left and right contains within it a deep irony. American liberalism is centered on the idea of social justice, free speech, freedom of religion, celebration of diversity, and an individual’s fundamental right to free expression, without fear of reprisal or being ostracized. As I have written elsewhere this ideal is subverted by the rise of political correctness, particularly on college campuses. But as an ideology, liberalism is consistent with the promotion of LGBT rights, keeping religion out of politics, and advocating for the poor.

American conservativism on the other hand is founded on three basic principles that contrast sharply with leftist philosophy: liberty and freedom from restrictions of arbitrary force; tradition and order, and belief in god. As with liberals, these ideals are often undermined in practice. A fourth tenet is often cited here, the rule of law, but in reality both sides claim that, and both liberals and conservatives seem to apply this principle only when convenient to their cause.

But in looking at these opposing ideologies, we come to the deep irony referenced earlier. The left wants a big central government, but a small military and a government that stays out of our personal lives, bedrooms and doctors’ offices. The right wants a small government, but promotes a big military and seeks government influence to regulate reproductive choice, sex acts in our bedroom (12 states still have anti-sodomy statues in force), what bathrooms we can use, and religion in politics to promote a Christian agenda (a majority of conservatives believe the United States is or should be a Christian nation).

Let’s be clear then: both liberals and conservatives want a strong or big government when suited to their causes and a weak or small government when government interference is counter to those causes. They simply want big and small government for opposing purposes. Neither side can claim ideological purity here; which brings me back to Federalists and anti-Federalists. Given the obvious hypocrisy on both left and right on the role of the central government, we see more clearly the genealogy of today’s Parties, with the GOP aligned cleanly with Federalists and Democrats clearly the progeny of the anti-Federalists. We need not worry ourselves about the reversal in opinions about central government because both sides really claim both sides of this issue.

Room for Hope

This now-obvious parallel between the growing animosity between right and left today and with the Federalists and anti-Federalists in the late 1700s actually gives us some measure of hope. We’ve been here before, right at the beginning, and we’re still standing today.

We seem to cycle through periods of extreme polarization. In the decade following 1830, we had extreme partisanship between the Jacksonians and Whigs. The source of animosity was the same as always (with the added bonus of slavery thrown in): Jacksonian Democrats favored states’ rights and resented any Federal government intrusion into social and economic affairs. Jacksonians represented the “common man” and the poor “living off the land.” In contrast, Whigs were typically wealthy industrialists and nationalists who advocated for a strong central government. The sides fought about religious freedom. Sound familiar?

As an historic aside, we should mention that the Whigs eventually died on the issue of slavery, with the northern contingent opposed to that institution and the southern faction in favor of slavery. This split in the Whigs is what led to the formation of the Republican Party, with Abraham Lincoln as the first presidential candidate of the new Party.

The Jackson-Whig battle is the echo sound of history repeating itself, a replay of the fight between Federalists and anti-Federalists. And the fight never ended, with extreme partisanship rearing its ugly head again in the Civil War, Vietnam War, the McCarthy era, and the civil rights movement. Each time feels like the worst, like the country is being pulled apart, that the end is near. That is precisely why historic perspective is important. The basic issues remain the same as we cycle through periods of greater or lesser tolerance and extremism. We will certainly cycle through this latest period of angst.

We are clearly in a time of ascending intolerance. The likes of Sarah Palin, Mitch McConnell, George W. Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump represent the right’s radical embrace of extreme partisanship. But as bad as this feels, as close to the Apocalypse as this seems, take solace in knowing that we’ve experienced this radicalism previously and survived. Supporters of Jefferson and Hamilton hated each other passionately. Those behind Andrew Jackson and supporters of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster were violent enemies. These opposing forces were every bit as far apart or more than what we see in the vast abyss separating Clinton and Trump. And yet here we are.

Seen from the high perch of history, the future is not as bleak as the present would indicate. In fact, there may be room for actual optimism. It could well be that if Trump loses, and loses badly, we could be witnessing the nadir of this latest cycle of extremism, which could die along with Trump’s megalomaniac dreams. Trump is the natural consequence of the GOP embrace of ignorance as a virtue mixing with obstructionism as a form of patriotism; like a mushroom is a natural consequence of darkness and dung. He does not represent a movement; he is nothing but the product of decay, a process that could well be reaching its end. Few people outside the world of historians remember Henry Clay; fewer will remember Trump. He will be a footnoted curiosity marking the beginning of the end of right wing ascendancy in American politics. There is room for hope.

Only a few months ago, on January 10 of this year, David Bowie died, leaving behind a wake of global grief and an outpouring of admiration for his life’s work. Now Prince is dead, and world mourns the loss of another irreplaceable icon. In both life and death, these two beloved artists have reached across cultures, age groups, social strata and ethnicity with their extraordinary talent.

Perhaps one lone survivor of WWII isolated on a remote Pacific island far from modern civilization is unaware of these events, but it would seem nobody else could be due to saturation coverage by traditional news outlets and a constant barrage of tweets and posts on every conceivable social media app. And with this ubiquity I start to have misgivings.

Idol Worship

When reporting the murder of John Lennon on December 8, 1980, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite started the evening newscast with the following statement: “The death of a man who sang and played the guitar overshadows the news from Poland, Iran and Washington tonight.” In this statement Cronkite cleverly captures simultaneously his admiration for Lennon and the irony of how his death was being covered. He acknowledges that an entertainer who “played a guitar” could command such focused global attention only if there was something more there, his own understated tribute to Lennon’s greatness. Cronkite was an early Beatles fan, at least through the eyes of his daughters, who he got into the dress rehearsal for the Beatle’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964. Yet Cronkite here is clearly uncomfortable with the shifting balance between his personal and global admiration for Lennon and his understanding of concurrent international events that demand the world’s attention. He frets about the loss of perspective.

As an aside, Cronkite’s own death invoked a dose of irony involving yet another cultural icon, Michael Jackson, a juxtaposition that I can only hope Cronkite would have appreciated. Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009. Cronkite had the misfortune of dying only three weeks later on July 17, 2009, after a period of failing health. Those three weeks though were but a brief moment in the long public mourning and non-stop wall-to-wall reporting about everything Michael. Consequently, coverage of Cronkite, his life, his accomplishments, were ironically overshadowed and cut short by the very type of celebrity worship that bothered him following Lennon’s murder.

Turning Point

Cronkite had the proper sense to know that our response to celebrity death had become disproportionate to its importance after a long career of reporting on global affairs that changed the course of history. He witnessed this first nod to worldwide celebrity worship with the extraordinary mass hysteria that followed Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in August 1997. Diana’s car accident was one of the first major stories to break on the web, with online news just in its earliest stages of development. Mainstream media moguls struggled to catch up with a competition they did not understand, and in their efforts nearly erased the difference between tabloid and serious news. The shift to tabloid-style reporting was largely successful, and more than 33 million viewers saw Diana’s funeral. A report on Diana’s media coverage later concluded that “this confluence of controversies has led the American media to reexamine fundamental questions about their role, responsibilities and relationship to the American people.” But the result was more tabloid sensationalism, not less. The most potent fuel to feed media-led frenzies continues to be celebrity death. The press never weaned itself from the orgy of coverage of Diana’s fatal accident, and the public demand for such news only grew more voracious. Sensationalism in mainstream news begat public voyeurism, which in turn created a growing market for sensationalism in a vicious cycle of mutual degradation. This cycle of supply and demand is reminiscent of the illegal drug trade. We have drugs moving north because there is demand. The media created the market for sensationalism, like dealers hooking new users; then the users – and viewers – create more demand in a feedback loop that is mutually reinforcing. Our addiction became evident when Michael Jackson’s death consumed 18 percent of all traditional news coverage in the week of his death, and 17 percent for the ensuing two weeks. Magazine revenue increased by $55 million in the two month period following Jackson’s death. High-profile deaths were and still are manna from heaven for print and broadcast media in the era of internet news.

Now what we are seeing with the public response to the loss of Bowie and Prince is the inevitable consequence of this cultural shift that began pivoting to its more modern form after Jackson’s death. According to a 2009 Pew poll, a sizeable majority of Americans said that news organizations gave too much coverage to the Jackson story. That disconnect may well be the last time there was a gap between majority public sentiment and saturation celebrity death news coverage. With Prince, and with Bowie, the transformation is complete. I doubt we would find such a gap now between news and expectations; hard to imagine that Millennials and Gen Y would find anything amiss about all things turning purple even if Prince is a bit old for them.

There is one odd note here. While the public gorges on the sensationalism of celebrity death with no apparent ill-ease, coverage of scandals while a celebrity is alive is a different matter. About half of all news coverage on both TV and the internet is focused on celebrity gossip. In 2007, the last year for which I can find statistics for this, 87 percent of the public believed that celebrity scandals receive too much coverage. So: too much focus on live celebs, but we can’t get enough of the dead ones.

All About Us

What we witness here, but largely fail to appreciate, is that the death of a celebrity like Prince evokes a response that reveals more about us than about the deceased. Our chest beating in grief is a bit self-indulgent. Cronkite was a dinosaur from the past but one who understood this and reported accordingly, but he was probably the last one to do so.

We can use the opportunity in reflecting upon Prince and his life to examine our own sense of priority. We fashion a myth and then mourn the loss of our creation, which has little to do with the person who died. We have created a secular religion, complete with our messiahs. But in creating a demigod, we lose the real human behind the illusion. We do a disservice to the ones we mourn as well as to ourselves in exaggerating the impact of loss out of proportion to life’s many other important affairs.

Prince was an iconic figure, a giant in the music industry, a true legend in his own time. His death is newsworthy, absolutely. It is a question of balance and perspective. The outpouring of public angst, candlelight vigils, somber prayer sessions and color tributes on major world monuments was just maybe too much given competing world events and in view of the sweeping saga of human history. As much as we love Prince, this was not the fall of Rome, Pearl Harbor or a moon landing. Prince entertained us, thrilled us, moved us, brought us together, changed music and how we experience it; he did not cure cancer.

Let’s frame Prince’s contributions and his death in the context of the real world of joys and losses that we personally experience in our own lives. Let’s honor Prince by celebrating his life with respectful admiration from the sensible perspective of our rich human past rather than placing him in a false pantheon elevated by myth in place of true accomplishment. Prince’s art stands on its own without embellishment and we diminish him by amplifying his influence beyond its rightful place. As we would with any high-profile death, we honor Prince’s memory best with balance, and a realistic view of his important contributions unburdened by the worship of a man that never existed but in our own minds.

I doubt many would question my liberal credentials, probably best defined by epithets from those right of center who object to my writings and background. To them I am a liberal elitist, left-wing extremist, godless sinner and, one of my favorites, “nothing but an immoral pointy head atheist” who “hates America” among other transgressions. Fan mail at its best. A common technique to express disdain in letters to me is to put in quotes my qualifications as a “neurobiologist” and “senior White House Policy advisor” in the Clinton administration.

I wear with great pride this scorn from the right and consider the label of liberal a badge of honor. But during this election cycle I find myself becoming increasingly annoyed with my left-leaning colleagues and friends. Many seem to have forgotten or wish to deny the deep truth that idealism is not a foundation for governance. This growing disconnect from reality manifests itself in expressing “disappointment” in President Obama and self-destructive vows to deny support to the Democratic nominee should it be Hillary for those feeling the Bern, or to a lesser extent should it be Bernie for Clinton supporters. For my fellow liberals still willing to read on, let’s look at why we need to gain a little perspective.

President Obama

By any objective measure, we are better off after nearly 8 years of Obama. He has made important progress in tackling issues of health care, crime, racism, immigration, environmental protection, energy, trade and national security. Of course more needs to be done, and he did not do all he wanted. That is the reality of democracy. But given what he inherited, and the opposition he faced, his accomplishments border on the miraculous. We now have the longest streak of job growth in history, adding 14.4 million private sector jobs over 73 straight months, with lower unemployment than under Ronald Reagan, about half of what he inherited from Bush. Obama has reduced the deficit by over $1 trillion. Even if you look at total debt, which obviously goes up because there is an annual deficit, Obama added less debt as a percent change in public debt than either George Bush, or that paragon of fiscal conservativism, Ronald Reagan. With Obamacare he brought the number of uninsured to below 10% for the first time in our history. He saved the auto industry, which sold 17 million cars in 2015, the most in our history. The stock market has soared to record heights during Obama’s tenure, and gas prices are the cheapest in over a decade. Obama saved the housing industry from collapse, prevented the banking industry from imploding, and kept the stock market from sliding into depression-era territory. These are historic accomplishments.

In spite of early impatience in the LGBT community, Obama has done more to protect LGBT rights than any other president by repealing Don’t Ask , Don’t Tell, ending the legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), signing historic hate crime legislation, ensuring hospital visitation rights for LGBT patients and partners, expanding access to health care without worries of pre-existing conditions, ensuring equality for LGBT federal government employees, and taking steps to ensure LGBT equality in housing and crime prevention.

On foreign policy, the Nation rightly concludes that “Barak Obama is a Foreign Policy Grandmaster.” He withdrew troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, decimated al-Qaeda, thwarted Iran’s nuclear program, removed chemical weapons from Syria, toppled Gadhafi, halved the number of Russian and American nuclear missile launchers, redirected relationships with Cuba, improved ties with India, and signed a climate deal in which China for the first time agreed to participate meaningfully. Yes the world remains a dangerous place, ISIS coming to mind, and any foreign policy is open to legitimate criticism. Any decision on the world stage will have undesirable impacts, and these are naturally the focus of critics. But even the conservative Wall Street Journal says of Obama’s foreign policy successes, “Give the president his due here.” They add that “Mr. Obama has largely succeeded in what he set out to do.” That conclusion is from a publication that is no friend to Obama.

What makes these accomplishments all the more remarkable is that Obama was working against an opposition openly committed to his failure, which is more or less unprecedented in its brazenness. Mitch McConnell said on October 23, 2010 that “my number one priority is making sure Obama’s a one-term president.” Not making America great, or preventing terrorist attacks, or helping the middle-class, or bringing home our troops – no, the Republican leader has one top goal – to deny Obama any success, at any cost to America. GOP leaders wish for Obama to fail more than they hope America will succeed. They are not alone, having plenty of rank and file support for this treasonous idea. Rush Limbaugh said simply, “I hope he fails.” Rep. Michelle Bachmann said, “We’re hoping that President Obama’s policies don’t succeed.”

In evaluating Obama’s tenure forget not either that the right has painted all that is bad as Obama’s fault and denied him credit for anything good. Two glaring examples prove he faces a degree of hypocrisy and cynicism that have taken our national politics into uncharted waters of hatefulness.

Gas Prices

When gas prices were rising rapidly, the right was quick to point fingers at Obama, placing blame for the high costs squarely at his door. Rick Santorum said that Democrats “want higher energy prices.” On that basis he opined that, “We need a president who is on the side of affordable energy.” Hmmm; wouldn’t that be Obama? Paul Ryan said, “What’s frustrating about the Obama administration’s policies are they’ve gone to great lengths to make oil and gas more expensive.” Similar statements were made by Mitt Romney, John Boehner, and a number of Representatives and Senators. Right wing media amplified this echo chamber withRush Limbaugh asking, “Will the media ignoring the rise in gas prices be able to keep that from becoming a major factor in people’s minds over the economy and Obama’s role in it?” Isn’t he the media? And what major newspaper did not talk about high gas prices? The National Review piped in with the conclusion that “Obama Policies to Blame for High Energy Prices.”

None of the above has issued an apology, noting that energy prices have declined under Obama. Remember the accusation was that Obama sought higher prices as a deliberate policy. But we have seen no retraction of that absurd claim: now that we have low prices, Obama’s policies are not responsible and nobody mentions his policy of seeking higher prices; no, low prices are due to “oil industry ingenuity.” Obama to blame for high prices; Obama has nothing to do with low prices. Costs up, Obama bad; prices down, oil industry smart, with past accusations conveniently forgotten. I wonder how these people sleep at night.

Stock Market

The GOP take on the stock market is even more remarkable than with gas prices, taking hypocrisy to truly new extremes. The DJIA was at 3310 on Bill Clinton’s first inaugural day. The market was 6813 when he was next inaugurated. At the end of Clinton’s second term, on the day Bush took office, the DJIA was at 10,578; that is the market Bush inherited from Clinton. When Bush left the Oval Office on January 20, 2009, the Dow was at 7,949, a decline of 25% over the eight years Bush was president. By March the DJIA had completed its tumble to bottom out with a 12-year low at just over 6500. Republicans blamed Obama for the continuing decline from 7,900 to 6,500 during his first month in office, but not Bush for the loss from 10,600 to 7,900 in eight years as president. Here is just one example:

Wall Street Journal (March 6): “Obama’s Radicalism is Killing the Dow.” AuthorMichael Boskin prognosticated that, “It’s hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president’s policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.”

Perhaps most astonishing of all, John Tanny of Real Clear Markets, wrote on November 25, 2008, an article entitled, “This Is Obama’s Market, Good and Bad.”Obama was not yet president! That did not stop Tanny from writing that, “Lacking clarity, investors can only guess about what’s ahead based on Obama’s decidedly anti-business rhetoric used during the campaign. Whatever direction he takes, it should be clear that today’s stock market is the Obama stock market, so it’s up to him to decide its basic direction.” Even though Obama was not yet president. So a declining market was Obama’s fault even before he took office; but after nearly 8 years in office, we hear…nothing. Where is the talk about Obama’s radicalism killing the Dow because he was re-engineering our economy? When the DJIA hit 17,000, did you hear conservatives say “this is Obama’s market”? Nothing? Cat got their tongue?

We see this same extraordinary double standard and outrageous hypocrisy with Obamacare, unemployment, national security, and in fact in every area where Obama has had success. When unemployment was 10%, Obama’s fault; when 5%, the number is meaningless.

I ask my liberal colleagues to think about this sick, irrational and polarized environment in which Obama must operate when evaluating his amazing accomplishments before becoming “disappointed” with him. He should be evaluated against the possible, not the unachievable ideal. In a perfect world, of course we would like him to have done more. Climate change is a good example. He made extraordinary and unprecedented progress on climate change, but only relative to the limits of international recalcitrance and a wall of opposition in the House and Senate at home. I wish he had done more; but also recognize real world constraints. I just wish my fellow liberals would do the same. We have no reasonable justification to be disappointed with Obama; but plenty of reasons to rejoice in his extraordinary accomplishments. Leave the negative hand-wringing to right wing extremists who simply cannot admit that Obama has been successful.

Bernie and Hillary

Nothing saddens me more than the rift within our liberal ranks caused by passionate support for one of these two great candidates. Let’s have the debate; let’s have the candidates give us their best. Let us each vigorously support the candidate of our choice. But once the nominee has been selected it is insane to withdraw support if the choice is not your man or woman. Too much is at stake for you to take your marbles and go home because you did not get all you wanted. Once the Democrats have chosen the Party candidate, your choice is no longer between Hillary and Bernie; but between one of those and Cruz or Trump (or whoever the GOP freak show eventually selects). Nobody other than a patient in a padded cell and helmet could possibly say that there is no difference between the Democrats and Republicans. Ralph Nader once made that claim and gave us the nightmare of George Bush. Even with Gore’s anemic campaign and loss of his home state, Gore would have been the clear winner absent Nader’s siphoning; let us not repeat that historic mistake. The distinction between left and right has never been greater, never starker, never more important.

Celebrities like Susan Sarandon do us no favors by being coy about supporting Hillary if Clinton gets the nomination. I admire Sarandon’s dedication to Bernie and to his ideals, and am happy to see her fight for him to win. But we become as nuts as the other side when we withdraw support from either Bernie or Hillary because one side or the other is “very passionate and principled” as Sarandon said of Bernie supporters. Whoever wins the nomination deserves our full backing, no matter who we previously supported in the primaries. We only provoke the crazies by suggesting that only one of our liberal candidates is worthy of fighting the insanity of the right. Withdrawing support for the Democratic nominee, be it Bernie or Hillary, is not an option because not voting is no different than pulling the lever for Trump or Cruz or whatever swamp creature emerges from the GOP morass – and that is political suicide for our country. So fellow liberals, stop moaning about Obama and be grateful for his courage, fortitude, political acumen and steadfast focus on the long game; he achieved the near impossible. And we must stop this ridiculous and I must say childish rant that we won’t support the Democratic nominee if he or she is not our first choice. Let idealism guide your heart and realism guide your vote.

Zombies and the walking dead make for good copy, but do little to advance our understanding of life and death. Unfortunately, neither did the National Geographicwith a cover article entitled, “The Science of Death: Coming Back from the Beyond.”

The article issues forth just about every misconception of life that permeates our national discussion. Sam Parnia, a critical care physician and author of the bookErasing Death, is quoted as saying that death “is a process, not a moment.” So far so good. But then he makes a common but critical error in thinking, which gets to the heart of our problem. In discussing a victim of a whole body stroke, Parnia writes that the patient’s organs can continue to function for a period after the heart stops beating. From this he concludes that “for a significant period of time after death, death is in fact fully reversible.”

Well, no, it is not. If a patient can be revived, the patient was never dead in the first place. But how can that be if we see no brain waves and the heart has stopped beating? Surely that is dead, isn’t it? If someone was revived from that state, clearly we must say he came back from the dead, no? That is certainly what is commonly believed, but no, we can’t. The success of reviving the victim means that during that state in which it seemed as if biological functions ceased, the functions essential for life in fact remained viable enough to be resuscitated – and therefore the patient never died. Reports of Mark Twain’s death were exaggerated only because he was not dead. The same is true for “miracles” like toddler Gardell Martin who was “dead” for an hour and a half after falling into an ice-cold stream. We are very happy to have him among the living, but he never left us in the first place.

We find this curious state of suspended animation difficult to accept as anything other than dead because we are asking the wrong question about life and death, without ever clearly defining what it means to be alive. Most of us hold deeply and unquestioned the idea that life is all-or-nothing , on or off, live or dead, one or the other, black and white. I mean, something is either alive or dead, end of story. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are in good company in failing to define life. Dating back to the early Greeks and across millennia to modern times, great minds have recoiled from the notion that life might be a matter of degree, because our intuition so strongly demands that something be alive or not. But our intuition serves us poorly here. The problem seems to be that the more rigorously we attempt to define life, the more we encounter ambiguous cases that test our assumptions, stretch the limits of our definitions, and demonstrate where intuition and common sense falter. With even casual observation, the essence of what makes something alive quickly becomes non-intuitive when we are presented by forms that defy easy categorization such as bacterial spores or crystallized virus capsules that can rest inert for centuries before being reanimated. Those viruses would appear to be no more alive than a pile of salt, but we know that only one can be re-introduced into the kingdom of the living.

Iron is Iron

History has failed to give us a good definition of life precisely because life was viewed not as this continuum from inanimate to animate, but as a huge leap from one to the other. To be alive meant having a special essence, something beyond the normal mechanisms that governed inorganic chemistry and physics. Invoking “vital forces” to explain life endures today in much of the general public. But vitalism, this endowing the living with a life force, is tautological, and explains nothing. If something is alive, it must have a life force; if it is dead, a life force must be absent. That is circular, not helpful.

We now know that no life force exists. The laws of physics and chemistry are indifferent to our struggle to define life, and operate identically on the same principles whether we deem something to be living or dead. The carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, iron and other atoms that come together to form our bodies are just that: the same elements that are found in the iron skillet in our kitchens and the nitrogen in the soil fertilizing our gardens. The atoms in our bodies are not special or endowed with any properties different from the atoms in every object around us. Iron is iron is iron, whether attached to hemoglobin in our blood or flaking off the hull of a rusting ship.

Continuum

A continuum describes a whole, no part of which can be distinguished from neighboring parts except by arbitrary division. The best example is visible light. You know without hesitation when something is green or blue, but cannot say exactly when one color yields to the next. Any attempt to define where one color ends and the other begins becomes arbitrary because green turns to blue across a smooth gradient of frequencies with no inherent boundaries. A pristine lake might be green-blue or blue-green or turquoise, but not clearly green or blue. This nature of the light applies to the idea of living and non-living as well. If we call green “dead” and blue “alive” we see that no boundary exists between the two because they transition one to the other with no intervening gap.

Atoms

Atoms deserve special attention since everything we know is an aggregation of atoms, the same in things dead or alive. The simplest and lightest atoms such as hydrogen, helium, and some lithium formed just moments after the Big Bang. A star derives energy from the combining of these lighter elements into heavier elements through nuclear fusion. Our own Sun is currently fusing hydrogen to helium, a process that will occupy most of its lifetime. After the hydrogen supply is depleted, the star will burn helium to form progressively heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen, silicon, sulfur, and iron. Up to a point, fusion releases energy and is therefore self-sustaining, which is why we see the sun shining every morning, unless you live in Seattle.

This all relates to life; just hold on a few more seconds. The creation of elements heavier than iron requires the input of energy, and is not self-sustaining. Some other source of energy is needed, and that comes from the explosion of a supernova. A massive star will eventually deplete its energy source of lighter elements. The star will collapse into itself when no longer supported by the release of nuclear energy through fusion. If the original star was sufficiently massive, the collapse will release a huge amount of energy in a spectacular explosion. The resulting supernova supplies the energy necessary to support fusion of nuclei heavier than iron. The explosion also causes a blast wave that ejects the elements into interstellar space. Some of this dust is eventually gathered up in planets, like earth, as new solar systems form. Every single carbon atom in your body, and every carbon atom in the charcoal at the bottom of your barbecue, comes from such interstellar dust.

Nothing Special

Derived from stardust, the elements in your body exhibit no special properties. Carbon is carbon. Nitrogen is nitrogen. Atoms are just atoms, so the old premise that life is made of some special stuff is wrong. But more modern efforts to describe life fall short, too. The most recent edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica offers a typical definition of life as a “state characterized by the ability to metabolize nutrients (process materials for energy and tissue building), grow, reproduce, and respond and adapt to environmental stimuli.” At first, that sounds perfectly reasonable, but the Britannica definition is in fact completely inadequate, as has been every previous attempt.

The Characteristics of Life

Broadly speaking, the following characteristics are usually invoked in various orders and degrees to define life: autonomy; reproduction; stability, change and evolution; resistance to entropy; conversion of matter and energy; metabolism; excretion; movement; autopoiesis; homeostasis; complexity; organization; growth and development; respiration; responsiveness; the presence of a genetic code. The fatal flaws in each of these characteristic called upon to define life all fall into just three simple categories: the traits assigned to life are present in some non-living systems (like growth, in crystals), the traits assigned to life are absent in some living systems (movement – think of sponges), or the traits can only be determined or defined across generations (like evolution or reproduction), depriving us of the ability to determine if the beast before us is alive or not. Every single character or trait that has been used to define life suffers from one or more of these three deficiencies.

Take the presence of a genetic code for example. That would seem to be a pretty good way of defining life because DNA is only found in living things. Wrong. We can extract DNA from fossils, and few would argue that an old bag of bones that has been in the ground for 100,000 years is alive. This type of defect in definition can be found in every one of those categories that so many have invoked to define life.

Beautiful Ambiguity

Let’s return to the idea of colors. Nobody would deny the existence of green or blue, yet nobody can define when one color becomes the other. That inability to draw a clear line between them does not diminish the reality of the two colors. We accept the existence of clearly identified colors even when the transition between colors of light are absent of any clearly delineated boundary. Life is no different. We know at the extremes when something is alive or not, with no ambiguity, just as we know something is green or blue. Other cases are ambiguous, just as we do not know when green becomes blue. A virus could be alive or not, simply depending on your perspective. In some cases, such as viruses, bacterial spores, and prions, defining matter as alive or not becomes arbitrary, an exercise in semantics, rather than a window into the deeper workings of nature. We might be obsessed with attaching a label of “living” to something, but that something simply sits somewhere along a continuum of complexity regardless of the label finally affixed, aloof to our discomfort.

The region along the spectrum of complexity where non-living transitions to living is a zone of ambiguity that exists because life is not an all-or-none phenomenon, and because the stuff of life is the same stuff as non-life. Previous definitions of life have fallen short because of a common commitment to find a unique spark that simply does not exist. Definitions struggled to capture something essential about life that was not found in the non-living world, rather than accept that no such distinction can be found. Definitions of life were meant to reflect something fundamental about nature, rather than serve as a useful tool for categorizing complexity. That is why all have failed.

There is no single unambiguous definition of life. Most examples of life are complex; most metabolize, grow, reproduce, and evolve over time. But not all do, and not all have all of these functions present. Some physical systems also share these same characteristics. That fact is not troubling; it reflects the reality of nature. “Life” is an arbitrary label we apply to distinguish extremes of complexity along a continuum. We know that a block of pure quartz is not alive and that a screeching kid in the restaurant is; whatever label we paste on all those cases in between is a convenient convention, but in no way reflects any fundamental break or division between the living and non-living.

These thoughts are not original, just widely ignored by those outside the field of biology. Josephine Marquand suggested in 1968 that we “avoid the use of the word ‘life’ or ‘organism’ in any discussion of borderline systems.” Norman Horowitz in 1955 and John Keosian in 1964 concluded much the same as here. Even the 1968 Encyclopaedia Britannica stated that “There is no point along the continuum of existence from the simplest atom to the most complex animal, at which a line can be drawn separating life from nonlife.” Notice, however that Marquand, Horowitz and Keosian are not household names, nor is the Britannica observation widely cited. The idea of a continuum of complexity, with simple inorganic systems at one end and the highest life forms at the other, is a bit difficult to digest, and does not satisfy the human need for easy answers. The idea also moves against the grain of our intuition about something being alive or not. So we put up some resistance. But resistance is futile.

With a new perspective on the phenomenon of life, we can look with a more jaundiced eye at claims of death and resurrection in cases like Gardell Martin. We can readily reject statements like “death is in fact fully reversible” when we know that life is a continuum along a spectrum of complexity, with no simple on-off switch. Those revived were never dead, the switch was never turned off – just dimmed to below our ability to see, waiting to be re-energized. Let’s move away from this rather silly idea of victims coming back from “the beyond” and leave Zombies, the walking dead and resurrection to Hollywood and Sunday sermons. You can’t come back from a place you’ve never been.

Spring Fever is upon us. Search not for scantily clad students roaming white sand beaches with yard-long margaritas; no, look instead to the madness of politics gone wild with crazy beyond what anybody could have imagined. While extremist statements on immigration, terrorism, torture and surveilling Muslim neighborhoods make headlines, we quietly observe almost without notice important anniversaries that have gotten lost in the noise of the absurd: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

In passing over important milestones in nuclear energy, we squander an opportunity to have an adult conversation about climate change and strategies to address the issue. We can hardly debate the proper role of nuclear power in those strategies, or the meaning of these anniversaries, when the problem of climate change itself is denied by every Republican candidate for president, the chairmen of the Science Committees in both the House and Senate, and leadership in both chambers. Here is a feeble attempt to energize the conversation.

Dates to Remember

In the wee hours on the morning of March 28, 1979, Unit #2 at Three Mile Island near Middletown, Pennsylvania, partially melted down. The accident exposed serious flaws in plant design, employee training, emergency procedures, and regulatory oversight, but in the end little radiation was released. Seven years later, on April 26, 1986, also early in the morning, nuclear reactor Unit 4 at Chernobyl blew its lid, spewing radioactive waste into the atmosphere, eventually requiring the evacuation of an area exceeding 1200 square miles and the resettlement of 350,000 people. Thirty years later much of that area remains uninhabitable. On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake hit northeastern Japan, followed by a towering tsunami that killed nearly 16,000 people, destroyed 128,000 buildings and damaged more than one million. The twin disasters also led to meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and the evacuation of 160,000 people within an exclusion zone of about 310 square miles; these people have not yet returned home, and may never. March and April are not good for nuclear energy.

Moving Forward

How do these events inform us about the future of nuclear power, or its place in addressing climate change? The answer turns out to be highly dependent on the perspective from which the question is posed. One view is that nuclear power is safe and cost-effective, with long periods of stability and reliability interrupted infrequently by accidents. The other view is that power from the atom is unsafe and costly, with catastrophic accidents separated by periods of stability leading to a false sense of security. In the first view, safe operation is the norm and accidents an anomaly; in the second view accidents are the rule and stability is the exception. Which view is a better reflection of reality? The best answer to this is found in “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable“ by Nassim Taleb. Taleb explains that a black swan is any event deemed improbable but one that causes huge consequences – like Chernobyl and Fukushima. Why black swan? In the mid-17th century Europe, scientists noted that all swans were always white; so a truth was born that all swans are white. The odds of seeing a swan of different color were deemed extremely improbable (or impossible). Yet in 1697 explorers discovered a black swan (Cyngus atratus) in Australia. Seeing just one black swan proved wrong all other claims that all swans are white, no matter now improbably the discovery might have been. Disasters at a nuclear power plant are the black swan of the industry: seeing just one proves wrong all other claims that nuclear energy is safe and economical.

If we include the cost of containing and cleaning up a nuclear accident, and the human cost of evacuating homes and businesses, and land rendered uninhabitable, nuclear energy quickly becomes too pricey. But proponents of nuclear energy externalize those costs, so the safety and economy of nuclear power are deemed reasonable. Proponents discount the importance of the black swan. But in highly technical terms, excluding the impacts of accidents is bat-dropping crazy. The cost of the Fukushima disaster is estimated to be between $250 billion to $500 billion. Even beyond these incredible financial costs, the environmental and social consequences are enormous and long-term. According to the report from the Physicians for Social Responsibility, we face tremendous long-term and costly challenges, which include at least the following.

Of the 160,000 displaced people, many still pay mortgages on properties they will never see again; hundreds of square miles of valuable land, once worth billions of dollars, are rendered worthless.

Fukushima resulted in history’s largest ocean discharge of radioactive material. Fifteen months after more than 700,000 curies of cesium were dumped into the ocean, more than half of all fish caught off the Japanese coast were found to be contaminated with the radioactive element.

Cooling the melted reactors requires water, lots of water, all of which is highly contaminated after use; to date there are 750,000 tons of water stored on site in hundreds of 10-meter-tall tanks, so many that there will soon be no room for more (Science, March 2016, v351, Issue 6277, p 1019). This is the tip of the iceberg: this same article notes that the “most daunting” task at Fukushima is recovering fuel debris since all or nearly all the fuel in the Unit 1 reactor burned through the pressure vessel, fell to the bottom, and possibly ate into the concrete base. We suffer these caveats of “possibly” and “nearly” because nobody has actually seen the damage except in a few isolated places. In another article on page 20 of that same Science issue, we learn that only now, five years after the disaster, are robots able to enter into the damaged reactors. Up until this year only one Japanese robot called Quince entered one ruined building, and a modified U.S.-military robot got a glimpse inside. Much remains unknown even now.

Decommissioning the plant will take 30 to 40 years, at a cost of at least another $9 billion; and that figure could go much higher depending on what the robots ultimately find.

Faulty Risk Management

Nuclear power survives on our inability to effectively evaluate risk; as a society we tend to discount the importance of the black swan, and instead designate periods of stability as the norm. We are lulled by those long periods of safe operation, and then seem shocked in the face of catastrophe that could have and should have been anticipated. Here is the hard truth: nuclear energy is not viable economically and never will be because of the terrible consequences of low probability high consequence risk. While bad events are rare, when they happen, the political, economic and human costs are much too high to absorb, even amortized over long periods of calm. And this does not include the problem of disposing of on-site nuclear waste or the life cycle costs of decommissioning a spent plant. Nuclear energy sounds good, but only if most of the true costs are externalized. Trapping the true cost of nuclear energy in the price of electricity would render the industry useless because the actual cost of electricity is prohibitive when not masked by subsidies and externalities. Only massive taxpayer support keeps nuclear power alive. Not long ago President Obama proposed a $36 billion federal loan guarantee for nuclear power plants. The magnitude of public largess can be seen in this summary from a study completed by the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC):

 

“In the USA alone roughly $100 billion has been spent on nuclear power plants that were never completed or finished over budget. Most if not all of this cost will be placed on the public (emphasis mine) without their knowledge. Unfortunately, since the life span of a nuclear power plant is only around 35 years, the 82 reactors operating will need to be decommissioned by 2014. If decommissioning costs 9% to 15% of the initial capital costs,13 the total cost to decommission these 82 nuclear reactors could reach $1 trillion. Of all the costs listed above this does not even include the spent fuel disposal costs, which have totaled to $18 billion in the USA alone.”

 

And here we see a deep irony. Those who wholeheartedly support nuclear energy are often the same folks who want a small government to get out of the way of business, allowing the magic of the market to work its glory. And yet the moment we have a Chernobyl or Fukushima, these very people expect the government, and taxpayers, to bail out the industry, when the market no longer works in their favor. This is further skewed from economic reality when we consider, finally, waste management and nuclear proliferation.

Waste Management

With Yucca Mountain dead, or at least moribund, the United States has no viable site for the nation’s nuclear waste. Nuclear waste will continue to accumulate at the 104 nuclear reactors in cooling pools on site at each plant. We currently have about 55,000 tons of nuclear waste in those pools. After an expenditure of about $10 billion, we have nothing to show for it – but those costs must be included in the price of nuclear energy.

Nuclear Proliferation

One way to cut down on the volume of nuclear waste, and to recover useable fuel contained in the waste, is to reprocess the fuel. The idea is attractive because the so-called waste really contains about 95% of the energy of the original stock. But reprocessing creates the issue of weapons proliferation, because reprocessing can lead to the production of weapons-grade plutonium.

Even without the problem of proliferation, reprocessing does not solve the waste problem; we are still left with large volumes of high radioactive material that needs to be disposed of. Less than 20 pounds of plutonium is needed to make a nuclear bomb. A full-fledged reprocessing program in the United States would create 500 metric tons of plutonium. It would not be difficult to lose 20 pounds without knowing it. Reprocessing is also expensive; about six times the cost of using enriched uranium and then disposing of the waste. Reprocessing is not the answer to the waste problem. Again we must include in the cost of nuclear power the enormous costs of storing and moving nuclear waste.

Future Plant Designs

A number of designs (so-called Generation IV) are being considered with the express purpose of greatly reducing or even eliminating the possibility of core damage. Gas-cooled, water-cooled and fast-spectrum designs are all in the running. All have potential problems even if ideally built but the safety improvements are dramatic, particularly for the high-temperature gas-cooled reactors using a so-called pebble design with passive safety. But it is not bullet-proof and the encasing graphite is combustible and some designs do not include containment structures, meaning radioactive materials would spread in case of an explosion. Some of the new designs would clearly be safer, and may make the emergence of a black swan less likely, but the catastrophic impact of an accident would remain a reality. And we still are burdened with waste and the potential for weapons proliferation.

The Illusion of Good: A False Promise

Nuclear energy offers, at least in theory, powerful benefits. Nuclear power plants emit no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. About one-fifth of our total electrical output in the United States is from 104 nuclear plants (which put out about 800 billion kWh in 2008). The painful and costly lessons learned from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl yielded a good safety record since… up to Fukushima. Other benefits include potentially unlimited energy, energy independence, and the positive geopolitical implications of weaning ourselves from foreign oil.

Yes, the allure of nuclear power is strong, but ultimately illusory. Insurmountable technical and economic problems ensure the industry will never be viable, even beyond the already sufficiently catastrophic issue of core melt or another Fukushima disaster. There are also other life-cycle costs that need to be considered, including the high and rapidly growing cost of plant construction (independent of regulatory demands). We also need to consider that a good portion of the emissions benefits of nuclear power compared to fossil fuel use could be realized by investments in renewable green technologies like wind, solar and geothermal, all of which avoid the problems of nuclear waste.

The bottom line is that nuclear power has great potential in theory, but not in reality. The on-going disaster in Japan reminds us that while we generally now view nuclear energy as relatively safe, the occasional outlier kills the industry. The inherent costs of an accident are too high to absorb. Imagine the cost of electricity if Japanese consumers paid the price of Fukushima in their utility bill. Unfortunately, the industry survives because we fail to evaluate properly low-probably high-consequence events. Nuclear power is with us only because we have inherent flaws in our ability to evaluate risk. That inherent imperfection is blinding us to the simple reality that nuclear power is dead; we just don’t see it yet.

The media frenzy surrounding Donald Trump has inverted the nature of our problem. That a demagogue will come along to foment dissent is no surprise; that his despicable views find such gleeful resonance with so many of our voters is the frightening story, not Trump. Trump is that ominous lump we first feel in our collective breast, an ill-omened warning of a more virulent disease about to attack our body politic. Trump’s ascendancy is nothing more than the visible symptom of the underlying disease, a metastasizing cancer of ignorance and hate consuming our society. Trump is not scary – he is a buffoonish Mussolini with bad hair; but those who wish to vote for him are truly terrifying.

The media have either missed or ignored the central shift that should be the focus of reporting: Trump’s supporters bring to light the fact that right wing theology has moved from traditional conservative values to the full embrace of authoritarianism.

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Hermann Goering

We are witnessing a society going or gone mad, a collective lunacy that has detached from reality. We have seen this before and it did not end well. I despise facile references to past historic abuses, because such overreach diminishes the true horrors of atrocities such as the Holocaust or Stalin’s purges. But with Trump and his supporters we simply cannot ignore the parallels to Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Muslims are the new Jews; propaganda dominates the airways, masquerading as hard fact; a fringe candidate rises on the wings of hate, paranoia and grievances real and imagined, promising a “return” to better times less tainted with the unwashed and unclean who have corrupted our virtues and undermined our economy. But…but, the claim of parallels between our situation now and Europe then – in the early part of this century – is so commonly quoted and so badly abused, the burden of proof is high. So let’s meet that challenge.

Trump proposes that the U.S. Government should shut down mosques; yes, just like Nazi Germany closed synagogues. Should we have our own version of Kristallnacht now? Worse, if there can be a worse, pining for the good old days of internment camps for the Japanese during World War II, Trump suggests that the government create a database to track Muslims - much like the Nazis tracked Jews. Perhaps we should require that all Muslims wear yellow crescent moons to make them easier to identify. If it was good enough for the Nazis, it is good enough for us, no?

It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into philanthropy and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

You think I’m pushing the parallel between Trump and the rise of fascism and National Socialism too far? Then perhaps this will feel more familiar when you realize that nearly 35% of Trump followers support banning gays and lesbians from the country. Yes, you read that correctly. In South Carolina, a CBS poll concluded that 75% of Republican voters supported banning Muslims from the United States. Remember, Hitler wanted to ban Jews from Germany. Trump and his followers want to ban Muslims and the entire LBGT community. The parallel is really not a stretch.

With enough mental gymnastics, just about any fact can become misshapen in favor to one’s conformational bias.

Criss Jami

Trump describes immigrants as rapists and criminals. “But you have people coming in and I’m not just saying Mexicans, I’m talking about people that are from all over that are killers and rapists and they’re coming into this country.” Never mind the pesky fact that there is no evidence that immigrants commit more crimes than people born in the country. Here is the conclusion from a Congressional Research Service report from 2012: “The overall proportion of noncitizens in federal and state prisons and local jails corresponds closely to the proportion of noncitizens in the total U.S. population.”

If you a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

Joseph Goebbels

With this dark but factually incorrect perspective on the influx of criminals, Trump not surprisingly has a solution when he says all undocumented workers “have to go.” This means that a candidate for the presidency of our country is proposing, seriously, that we locate, round up, arrest and then forcibly deport a population of11 million people. To find these undesirables in our midst, would we create a secret police like the Stasi in East Germany, so neighbors would rat on neighbors? Who would take care of the children left behind? Do we perhaps create camps in which we concentrate these populations prior to expelling them?

Trump accuses Obama of being “weak and ineffective” on terrorism. Of terrorism he says, “This is a war, believe me. We’re going to have to knock them out and knock them out hard.” The implication is that Obama does not know this, or if he does, has done nothing about it. Yet Obama has decimated Al Qaeda, and has aggressively pursued ISIS and other terrorist organizations. Drone strikes under Obama have killed nearly 2,500 people, including innocents who suffer from such attacks. Under Obama’s leadership, there has been no attack like 9/11 as there was under Bush. But no matter that Obama has kept us safe (certainly safer than Bush):

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Perhaps the most extreme proclamation from Trump is that he would kill the families of terrorists. He would order our military to kill innocent non-combatants. He has proposed that we kill the family members of ISIS terrorists because they “know what is going on” because they are related to the terrorists. There is yet another pesky fact that intentionally killing civilians in wartime is a crime against humanity under two international treaties signed by the United States: the Hague Convention and the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Voters may dismiss all of this with a wave of the hand, claiming that Trump does not mean what he says, or that Trump is simply breaking the mold and saying what others are afraid to utter; or that while his rhetoric may be extreme his governance would not be. This easy dismissal of extremism we have seen before as well, and that too did not end well. On November 21, 1922, Cyril Brown published in the New York Times a story on the up and coming Adolf Hitler. While noting Hitler’s increasingly vocal anti-Semitism, the author dismissed this as “not so violent or genuine as it sounded” but rather a political ploy to pander to the angry German masses. The article goes on to report that Hitler was “merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.”

The Cult of Ignorance: Mainstream Extremism

As with demagogues and tyrants from the past, Trump did not arise in a vacuum. No, indeed, the GOP has long been nurturing the conditions that created this monster and his followers. The beginning of the end was Sarah Palin, the first national candidate in memory to embody stupid and embrace dumb. For the first time, at least in my lifetime, a national candidate wore ignorance as a badge of honor. And we have only gone downhill from there. This year we have witnessed Republican presidential hopefuls descend down to historic and frightening lows of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, each vying to outdo the other to glorify ignorance. The ugly truth is that Trump’s brazen and popular foray into the realm of vile rhetoric builds on a terrible reality of conservativism in the United States: right-wing thought has fully embraced ignorance and hate as legitimate political platforms.

We are witnessing the clash of reason and faith, between science and religion, between truth and the big lie, between demagoguery and sane debate. Nowhere is that made clearer than in the Republican debates. History will show we reached the nadir of public discourse when Donald Trump on national television in a presidential debate defended the size of his penis – but that is really nothing but comic relief, even if mired in 6th grade male humor, compared to the horror of the anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-reason positions these candidates have taken.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

Isaac Asimov

But unlike in the times Asimov references this “strain” has become mainstream, the bedrock of conservativism, not some offshoot of extremism or undercurrent in society. The dumbing of America has reached new extremes, and these extremes have paved the way for demagoguery. Here are some frightening statistics:

• 18% of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth.

• 74% of Republican Senators deny the validity of climate change

• 50% of Americans between the ages of 18-24 believe it unnecessary to know the location of other countries, even from those in which important news is being reported

• 42% of Americans believe God created human beings in their present from less than 10,000 years ago

• 25% of public school biology students believe that humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time

Rather than rail against this outrage, Trump and his ilk proudly promote their disdain for science and ignorance of the scientific method, a gaping chasm of reason that is front and center in the field of candidates on stage with Trump. With the big lie and the reliance on faith rather than fact politicians are not constrained by the annoying shackles of reality. Denying the truth of climate change is now mandatory for any Republican; the GOP is perhaps the world’s only remaining significant political organization that reject the obvious certainty of human-caused climate change. False statements about Planned Parenthood are taken at face value by party sympathizers even when easily shown to be fantasy. Fighting evolution is part of the GOP fabric, a modern day version of the Church’s attacks on Galileo. Ignore the fact that we can demonstrate evolution in a Petri dish; it has been proven across multiple fields of science including genetics, biogeography, and paleontology. Even the Pope in 1996 grudgingly admitted that evolution is “more than just a theory.” But the GOP hangs on to the fifteenth century, touting the wonders of medieval sorcery.

Trump’s campaign highlights like few others could that we are in a race for the bottom, in which the candidate who best embraces ignorance and hate wins. Once beliefs are divorced from reality, anything goes. With no common understanding of even baseline truths, we lose the ability to have any meaningful discourse to solve our very real problems. We can magically deport 11 million people. We can identify Muslims and track their movements. We can close mosques. All without consequence. Sure, why not, because reality and objective truths are no constraint.

We are plumbing new depths of depravity here; previously any one of Trump’s extreme proclamations would have knocked a candidate out of the race within a few hours of being verbalized. Now, the crazier the talk the more traction the candidate gains. The cancer is spreading. Before talking about his penis, Trump openly mocked a New York Times reporter by imitating his spastic movements. Trump believes the normal human act of going to the bathroom is too gross to be mentionable. He has denigrated Hillary Clinton for taking a bathroom break during a debate saying that “I know where she went. It’s disgusting.” There has likely never been a more misogynist candidate; he constantly degrades women. He said that Arianna Huffington, “…is unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man – he made a good decision.” If he does not like a question from a female reporter he will dismiss her as menstruating. Trump has called women “pigs“, “dogs”, and “disgusting animals.” This is a candidate for president of the United States – a candidate that could survive only with an electorate too dumb, too ignorant, too hateful to stop the madness – reminiscent of 1920s Germany.

Take America Back: Make America Great

The slogan and its many variations of “make American great again” often show up in conservative circles. To what age are we harking back to exactly? The days of owning slaves? Again, perhaps you believe I’m resorting to hyperbole here. Alas, no (and I am not making this up): polls show that nearly 40% of Trump supporters question whether the Emancipation Proclamation was a good thing. We cannot be surprised that the White Supremacist movement has embraced Trump as one of their own; or that Trump only reluctantly and unconvincingly puts any distance between himself and David Duke.

Do we pine to return to the economic meltdown of the Bush Administration, the war crimes of torture, the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history? Do we want to go back to the days of losing 700,000 jobs per month? Massive and growing deficits (which have shrunk by $1 trillion under Obama)? Wait, let’s pause here: in fact, the deficit under Obama is now 2.5% as a percent of the total economy, below the average of the past 50 years. So we want to make American great again by returning to debilitating deficits? Do we really want to take America back to two wars unfunded and poorly managed, a collapsing housing market, the banking industry on the brink of ruin, a stock market declining after losing 25% of its value during Bush’s 8 years? Do we want to return to the glory days of gas at $4 per gallon? Do we want to make America great again so we can again witness the auto industry on the verge of bankruptcy? What the hell are these people talking about when they want to make American great again? Do they mean they want to go us to go back to the Clinton Administration, the only other period of extended economic prosperity in the last 50 years? American never stopped being great; proof is we have recovered, once again under Democrat leadership, from the disastrous years of incompetent Republican rule.

Make no mistake; this is war, a fight for the soul of our nation. Making America great means, to the extreme right, dragging us back into another Dark Ages just as the rest of the world is embracing the knowledge and new technologies of the 21st century. Trump and his ilk are a pathological infection of, consuming us from within. Trump is no joke because his followers are real. His colleagues on stage are just as frightening. This is deadly serious. Our only hope is that the shocking truth about the GOP as revealed by Trump’s candidacy will bring the American electorate to its senses. To survive we must reject the lies from the right so often in the past couched in acceptable terms, as if whispering would somehow help us ignore the crazy uncle in the basement nobody wants to acknowledge. Trump and his supporters bring the crazy to light; now we can see in stark contrast what our real choices are for the future. Let us hope we have enough collective wisdom to reject the false promises of xenophobic authoritarianism; enough fortitude to embrace the messy future of an inclusive democracy.

Now this is something you will never hear mentioned by a Republican presidential candidate during any debate: the price of gas. The cost of fuel has not been uttered one time by a single candidate in any GOP debate; nor was the issue ever raised prior to the caucus in Iowa. Odd that, because fuel prices were previously trotted out as clear proof of Obama’s incompetent handling of the economy. When prices go up, Obama is at fault; when prices decline, silence. No retraction of earlier claims of economic doom in the face of the alleged failure of White House economic policy.

The Gold Standard of Double Standards

In the last election, John Boehner (R-OH) said of gas prices, “This debate is a debate we want to have.” Well I guess they do not want to have that debate anymore. Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio have all been persistently silent about the pesky fact that the price of gas today is the same as what we were paying nearly ten years ago.

With a commodity price so easily quantified, we have the perfect opportunity to demonstrate that hypocrisy is truly the core foundation of right wing thought and the basis for Republican politics. I challenge anybody to provide the equivalent of what you see below for the Democrats. We will demonstrate in black and white that the GOP vocally, loudly and undeniably blamed Obama for expensive gas as prices climbed toward $4 per gallon. The current silence is all the more noticeable because the right openly blamed the president not only for pursuing a bad energy policy but for actively seeking higher prices. Rick Santorum said that Democrats “want higher energy prices.” On that basis he opined that “We need a president who is on the side of affordable energy.” Hmmm; wouldn’t that be Obama?

Here are just a few more examples of this outrageous double standard. When reading these, ask yourself what these politicians are saying today:

Mitt Romney: Obama to Blame for High Gas Prices

Romney said on Fox News (where else?) that he believes “absolutely” that Obama is responsible for high gas prices. To bolster his point, Romney noted that Obama does not allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR), and his refusal to build the Keystone pipeline from Canada to Texas. Romney said of Obama, “His policies are responsible for not having America using the energy that we have in this country.”

Paul Ryan: Obama Gone to Great Lengths to Keep Gas Prices High

Romney’s vice presidential candidate said that… “what’s frustrating about the Obama administration’s policies are they’ve gone to great lengths to make oil and gas more expensive.” He does on to say, “Let’s not forget the fact that the regulations coming out of the EPA are making it harder for us to harness home grown American energy.”

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH)

“The president holds the key to addressing the pain Ohioans are feeling at the gas pump and moving our nation away from its reliance on foreign energy. My question for the president is: what are you waiting for?” Getting more specific, Boehner claimed that, “The president’s own policies to date have made matters worse and driven up gas prices.”

Senator John Barrasso (R-WY): Obama Fully Responsible for High Gas Prices

Senator Barrasso claimed “The president has been a complete obstructionist on that, and his energy policy, if you want to even call it a policy, has in my opinion actually contributed if not caused the pain at the pump, and he should be held fully responsible for what the American public is paying for gasoline.”

Representative Cory Gardner (R-CO): Obama Policies to Blame for High Gas Prices

Cory Gardner jumped on the bandwagon, complaining that, “The longer we let politicians like President Obama continue to block responsible American energy production, the longer our nation will continue to suffer with high gas prices and limited energy security.”

National Review: Report Finds Obama Policies to Blame for High Energy Prices

“What President Obama failed to accomplish through the so-called ‘cap and trade’ program, his administration is attempting to accomplish through regulatory roadblocks, energy tax increases, and other targeted efforts to prohibit development of domestic energy resources.”

Rush Limbaugh: Obama Wants Higher Gas Prices

Oddly, in his rant against Obama, Rush asks, “Will the media ignoring the rise in gas prices be able to keep that from becoming a major factor in people’s minds over the economy and Obama’s role in it?” Funny given the torrent of news coverage on higher gas prices, and the GOP’s consistent drum beat blaming Obama. Do these guys ever apologize for being so spectacularly wrong?

High Gas Prices are President Obama’s Fault

In this article, the author claims that “The Obama administration’s energy plan all along was based upon the rise in energy costs in order to force Americans to be ‘greener.’” The piece goes on to say that “President Obama wants Americans to believe that he is powerless to stop the high rise of gasoline prices yet it is his (in)actions that have created the crisis… What the president fails to realize is that there is no one to blame for rising energy costs other than himself.”

Billboard Blames Obama for High Gas Prices

In this case, a conservative businessman by the name of Bret Eulberg posted for all to see the message: “Gas $1.85. Obama took office. Tight drilling regulations. No Pipeline. Obama- Higher Gas.

Can any reader, of any political persuasion, even those who only watch Fox News, claim that the GOP did not openly, blatantly, consistently blame Obama and his failed energy policies for high gas prices? Can we be any clearer about that? No matter who you are, no matter your political persuasion, you simply cannot deny this fact.

How is it then, if Obama is to blame for high gas prices, if Obama’s energy policies have been disastrous, that prices have fallen to well below $2/gallon at the pump? After all, the fact of high gas prices was offered as proof that Obama had failed. But if his policies impact fuel prices, would they not be responsible for both the rise and fall of those prices? No sane person can claim he is at fault for higher prices but deserves no credit for lower costs. His policies influence price or not; nobody but the worst partisan could claim that Obama has no influence on gas prices as they decline, but that his policies are to blame for prices as they rise: such cognitive dissonance is a sign of mental instability, something that now seems to be a hallmark of the conservative movement.

Tip of the Iceberg

This outrageous double standard on fuel prices is not an anomaly. Republicans come down with a sudden case of amnesia when the subject turns to unemployment, the deficit, the stock market, the war on terror, and health care costs. As a small demonstration, let’s just look at two of these:

Health Care

In spite of the intense, unyielding, never-ending opposition to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, nobody can deny that Obama has tackled the problem of health care costs growing out of control when nobody before him would. And all signs point to success: Health care spending grew at 3.9% in the last three years, the lowest growth rate in 50 years.

“Although the economic downturn contributed to that slow growth, ACA provisions that incentivize providers to be more efficient while improving the quality of care, such as Accountable Care Organizations, medical homes and value-based purchasing, are helping to drive these encouraging trends, too. Some cost savings are even higher than expected. Before the ACA, Medicare spending was expected to grow 6.8% over the next 10 years, but new projections show a dramatic slowdown in spending growth to 4.8%. That 2% drop in spending will result in cost savings of $751 billion over the ACA’s first 10 years.”

I will wager that “health care costs have lowest growth rate in 50 years” is not a soundbite you will hear on Fox News.

Stock Market

The DJIA was at 3310 on Bill Clinton’s first inaugural day. The market was 6813 when he was next inaugurated. At the end of Clinton’s second term, on the day Bush took office, the DJIA was at 10,578; that is the market Bush inherited from Clinton. When Bush left the Oval Office on January 20, 2009, the Dow was at 7,949, a decline of 25% over the eight years Bush was president. By March the DJIA had completed its tumble to bottom out with a 12-year low at just over 6500.Republicans blamed Obama for the continuing decline from 7,900 to 6,500 during his first month in office, but not Bush for the loss from 10,600 to 7,900 in eight years as president. Here is just one example:

Wall Street Journal (March 6): “Obama’s Radicalism is Killing the Dow.” Author Michael Boskin prognosticated that, “It’s hard not to see the continued sell-off on Wall Street and the growing fear on Main Street as a product, at least in part, of the realization that our new president’s policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy, not just mitigate the recession and financial crisis.”

Perhaps most astonishing of all, John Tanny of Real Clear Markets, wrote on November 25, 2008, an article entitled, “This Is Obama’s Market, Good and Bad.” Obama was not yet president! That did not stop Tanny from writing that, “Lacking clarity, investors can only guess about what’s ahead based on Obama’s decidedly anti-business rhetoric used during the campaign. Whatever direction he takes, it should be clear that today’s stock market is the Obama stock market, so it’s up to him to decide its basic direction.” Even though Obama was not yet president.

The stock market doubled in value during Obama’s first 14 months in office; it is now well into the 16,000s even after recent declines. Republicans no longer mention talk about the stock market after Obama’s nearly 8 years in power. Where is the talk about Obama’s radicalism killing the Dow because he was re-engineering our economy? When the DJIA hit 17,000, did you hear conservatives say “this is Obama’s market”? Hmmm? Cat got their tongue?

Coin of the Realm

Sure, hypocrisy is the coin of the realm in politics, and both sides play that game. But Republicans have taken the false indignation of double standards to a level rarely before seen in our political discourse. Obama’s deft handling of domestic and global affairs has sent the GOP into a paroxysm of childish pique and impish rants of outrage. The freak show we call the Republican primary is the inevitable and natural decline of reason as the GOP embraces ever more radical thought untethered by an objective reality. In this twisted world of hate, low gas prices and a strong stock market are not real, but the threat of Obama taking your guns is; climate change is a liberal hoax, but Planned Parenthood is selling body parts; sons of immigrants become anti-immigration; Obama is a foreign-born radical Christian, but also a Muslim, who hates America. Fantasy becomes dogma, faith trumps fact, and reality is optional. As a consequence of this Dantean descent into the tragicomedy of conservative hell, we have Trump, Cruz and Rubio. The right wing has become a nightmarish olio of xenophobia, misogyny and religious extremism growing on the foundation of anti-intellectualism and a disdain for science. The GOP has become a Party of medieval doctrine, with a platform designed to take us back to the Dark Ages. Once the hard facts of an objective reality are rejected as inconveniences, anything is possible, as is evident with every GOP presidential debate.

The GOP has evolved (ironically, a process they would deny) to be the proud political party of anti-intellectualism, harking back to the Dark Ages with a never-ending campaign against evolution, tired rants denying the reality of climate change, and a medieval understanding of human reproduction. But sadly this anti-science bent is not restricted to right wing ideologues, but instead has also infected the far left. While manifesting itself with symptoms in different areas of science, the underlying disease is the same on both extreme left and right: ignorance of the scientific method and the reliance on faith over fact.

In the case of liberals gone bad, vaccines offer the most prominent divergence from reality. The anti-vaccine movement gives us the clearest picture of how the far left and extreme right have become one stubborn bloc of boneheads impervious to the inconvenience of objective truth.

In a rather odd twist of fate, the anti-science rants from the right about climate change and the far left campaign against vaccines meet at a common point of ignorance about tropical disease. Consider two people circumnavigating the globe at the equator from the same starting point but moving in opposite directions; the two points furthest apart converge at the end where the journey began; so too here with anti-science zealotry on left and right: so far apart they merge together in a bond of extremism. Nowhere can this circle of delusion be seen better than with the emergence of the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne disease that can cause devastating brain damage in newborns.

Brazil has seen about 4000 such cases of microcephaly since October as a consequence of the rapid spread of Zika. U.S. officials warn us that this “once obscure virus” is spreading rapidly across Latin America and the Caribbean. So much so that the Center for Disease Control has issued a travel warning, urging pregnant women to avoid more than a dozen countries in which Zika can now be found. If you think you are safe here in North America, reconsider: the World Health Organization concludes that the Zika virus will spread to the United States. In North America alone about 200 million people live in areas conducive to the transmission of the virus.

Why Zika now? As with the emergence of West Nile in the United States, we are witnessing the inevitable march north of tropical diseases as a direct result of a warming planet. The number of diseases coming our way, or already here, is as frightening as it is real. That climate change would impact the transmission of infectious and tropical diseases has long been predicted from the very first reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Those predictions are now our new reality.

So the GOP denies the indisputable truth of global warming as Zika moves north; and the far left denies the extraordinary benefits of vaccines, which would obviously include a vaccination against Zika (research is being done). Tell the mother of a child who could be saved with a vaccine that we should not develop one because vaccinations are harmful. What we have here is the perfect convergence of ignorance mixed with political extremism, wrapped together in a bundle of delusional wishful thinking.

Enough Already

Climate change is real and caused by human activity; consequently tropical maladies are moving north. Vaccines, ever more important with advancing diseases, have proven beyond any and all doubt to be extraordinarily efficacious. Vaccines are the most important, effective, and safest medical advance in all of human history. Vaccinations have led to the eradication of smallpox and the near-eradication of polio. Anytime you might have even a twinge of a thought against vaccinations, think of the millions of people who suffered terrible disability and death prior to the development of vaccines for these horrible diseases. And the millions of people now free from those scourges because of vaccines.

And no, making a personal decision to eschew vaccines is not benign. If enough people do not get vaccinated, the entire community may suffer because “community immunity” becomes jeopardized. When a critical number of people in a population are immunized, even those unable to get vaccinated, like infants, the elderly, pregnant women, or immunocompromised patients, gain protection from the spread of contagious disease. In some cases, if immunization drops below a certain percentage of coverage even those vaccinated are offered less protection. In 2000 measles was nearly eradicated in the United States; with a drop in immunization due to unjustified concerns about vaccines, the United States is witnessing this year the largest measles outbreak since 1996.

The deep, terrible irony of the anti-vaccination movement is that the incredible success of vaccines has caused the uninformed to forget how important, successful and safe vaccination programs are; and how vital vaccines are to preventing horrible diseases from reemerging. And reemerge they do, as measles has. Measles is highly contagious and spreads rapidly among the non-vaccinated. There is no treatment for measles, only prevention. Ignorance, false claims to expertise and scientific illiteracy are threatening our children’s health.

These preventable outbreaks should remind us that every year vaccines save 3 million lives among children younger than five years old every year by preventing diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis and measles; if adults are included, vaccines save up to 6 million lives annually. If you oppose vaccinations you are willfully condoning the death of an additional 3 million children every year. The Third Edition of the State of the World’s Vaccines and Immunization reports that, “Between 2000 and 2007, the number of children dying from measles dropped by 74% worldwide, from an estimated 750,000 to an estimated 197,000 children. In addition, immunization prevents sickness as well as lifelong disability, including measles-related deafness, blindness, and mental disability.”

The study also states that, “In 1988, polio was endemic in 125 countries and paralyzing an estimated 350,000 children every year (close to 1000 cases a day). By the end of 2007, polio had been eradicated in three of WHO’s six regions – the Region of the Americas, the European Region, and the Western Pacific Region. Following implementation of the rubella elimination strategy in the Americas, the number of reported cases of rubella declined by 98% between 1998 and 2006. By 2000, 135 countries had eliminated neonatal tetanus and by 2004, annual deaths from neonatal tetanus had fallen to an estimated 128 000, down from 790,000 deaths in 1988.”

If you oppose vaccinations, try to justify that position with the reality that in the absence of vaccinations polio would paralyze 10,000 children every year; German measles would cause birth defects and mental retardation in as many as 20,000 kids, and diphtheria would be a common cause of death in school children. Anytime you have an urge to oppose vaccination, think of your kid dying of diphtheria. If you oppose vaccinations, you willingly accept that 10,000 kids each year become paralyzed with no reason.

Fact vs Fiction: How the Left Was Lost

Any Google search will show that the left has linked vaccines to autism. This bizarre claim comes from just one paper published in 1998 in the medical journal Lancet, subsequently withdrawn for suspicions of scientific fraud, and fully discredited by later study. Repeat after me: there is no evidence, none, zero, absolutely nothing, to link vaccinations with autism. It is a myth, a fallacy, factually incorrect. Yet tens of thousands of parents risk their children’s health by withholding critical vaccinations. Many parents still to this day insist that vaccines cause autism, even in the complete absence of any evidence to support the claim with the withdrawal of the original paper. You might as well claim that vaccines cause baldness. I am bald, and I have had many vaccines, ergo…

No, no, I’ve got the perfect claim: vaccines are ineffective and dangerous but prevent global warming. In that we combine belief in something for which there is no evidence and disbelief in another other for which there is indisputable proof. Perfect.

Vaccines save lives, millions of lives, and prevent untold suffering and misery. Would anti-vacciners deny a pregnant woman a Zika vaccine? Vaccines are safe and effective, as proven by billions of doses given with no harm. The efficacy of vaccines is beyond dispute with the eradication of some of humankind’s greatest scourges and the precipitous drop in diseases once common. Of course absolutely nothing is 100% safe and effective; sitting on your couch with a helmet does not guarantee an airplane tail won’t fall through your roof and kill you. But the awesome, amazing benefits of vaccines vastly, incredibly, outrageously outweigh any potential risk.

Opposing vaccines is foolhardy, dangerous, irresponsible, and just plain ignorant. Much like right wing opposition to climate change. Right and let extremism converge.

Please, please, please stop this misguided and misinformed anti-vaccine campaign and the absurd denial of climate change. Just say Zika and West Nile if you get weak. If you want to oppose vaccines, go to an island, with plenty of high ground, with all others of your ilk and witness the devastation as preventable diseases ravage your population while waves erode your beaches with rising tides. But leave the rest of us rational people to the task of saving lives with the greatest medical advance ever seen in human history while we try to stop further warming of the planet.