Monday, October 31, 2016

I couldn't agree more with John Oliver! Especially his last remark

John Oliver is downright frustrated.

There's lots he'd like to talk about on HBO's "Last Week Tonight," but he was forced to once again discuss the election after FBI Director James Comey wrote a letter to Congress about a new line of inquiry into Hillary Clinton's emails. 

"If this shitty development in a shitty campaign season were not grim enough, there is also the matter of where this latest problem came from," Oliver said. 

That would be former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner.   

"It seems Anthony Weiner is forcing the nation to re-litigate the entire email controversy and putting Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the presidency in serious danger," Oliver said. "Carlos Danger!"

Oliver described the FBI's announcement as the equivalent of a mystery box.

"And like the box from the end of 'Seven,' it could contain anything from nothing to Gwyneth Paltrow's head," he said. "Although it almost definitely contains Anthony Weiner's penis." 

Oliver thought we had reached beyond rock bottom when Donald Trump falsely accused former Miss Universe Alicia Machado of having a sex tape. But now we're way beyond even that, he said. 

"We have burrowed through not just rock bottom, but through the core of the earth, and we've come bursting out the other side, startling kangaroos, and we're currently hurtling toward outer space where there is no up, down, light, or darkness ― just an endless void in which death comes as sweet, sweet relief. Please let this thing be over soon!"

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Friday, October 14, 2016

Michelle Obama -- so far above Trump, she is unassailable

Michelle Obama has proven herself to be an honored and greatly respected First Lady. She is an impressively beautiful role model for all women and young girls.  The Obamas have gone high through eight long years of the Republicans going low, lower and lowest in attempts to bring them down with shameful ridicule.  They have ridden high over the gutter politics and the racist bigots who have criticized them and tried to take them down with jeering, sniping e-mails. In their unsuccessful attempts to humiliate the Obamas, their critics have managed only to reveal their own contemptible, narrow-minded prejudices and to dirty themselves in the process.  The Obamas, in contrast to the GOP Presidential nominee, have shown themselves to be the Best of the Best.  Michelle Obama is someone held in such high regard by Americans that Trump doesn't dare go near her name.  She and her husband and children remain far above Trump and his Alt-Right ilk, as if they live in a different universe from Trump and his supporters (which they do!).

WHY TRUMP ISN'T GOING AFTER MICHELLE OBAMA

ABC NEWS

Amid the din and rancor of an angry election, First Lady Michelle Obama managed to break through this week with a crisp message that will be particularly hard for political opponents to answer.

"A candidate for president of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women," Mrs. Obama said Thursday. "Let's be very clear: Strong men, strong men -- men who are truly role models -- don't need to put down women to make themselves to feel powerful."

The first lady never mentioned Donald Trump's name. Even so, suggesting that Trump's conduct means he can't be counted among "strong men" tests the limits of her vow to "go high" when the other side goes low.

The speech, along her extensive campaign travel on behalf of Hillary Clinton, puts at risk the first lady's public standing, which has delivered her approval ratings far beyond those who are typically associated with the daily grind of politics.

Yet Mrs. Obama managed to deliver her message in a way that not only resonated as a major campaign moment, but will also prove nearly impossible for Trump and his allies to answer.

Asked in a television interview Friday morning to respond to her, Trump's running mate professed to not understand her critique fully enough to even have a rejoinder.

"I have a lot of respect for the first lady and the job she has done for the American people over the last seven and a half years. But I don't understand the basis of her claim," Mike Pence said on CBS.

Obama managed to do something that few others -- not elder GOP statesmen, not gold-star families or prisoners of war, not federal judges, not even the pope himself -- have accomplished. She has, at least for now, managed to silence Trump and his campaign.

The reasons why get at what's made the first lady a unique political voice in these divided times. She has cultivated image as her husband's partner, yet somehow not dirtied by his political wars.

When the first lady spoke Thursday in New Hampshire, the campaign wasn't about decades-old groping allegations, or hacked emails, or even the very real policy differences between the two major-party candidates that rarely surface in discussion anyway.

Michelle Obama framed her argument around the kind of leader the nation wants for the kind of country it strives to have. She made the case personal, speaking as a mom and a woman with "strong men" in her life, in a way that crosses party and gender lines.

"I can't stop thinking about this. It has shaken me to my core in a way that I couldn't have predicted," Obama said, clearly referencing the allegations against Trump.

She lent her voice to a chorus of Democrats and even Republicans who are making the stand against Trump about something bigger than politics.

"This is not normal. This is not politics as usual," she said. "This is disgraceful. It is intolerable."

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Thursday, October 13, 2016

Good stress-coping advice for a healthier heart and better sleep

People Who Embrace This Perspective Sleep Better and Have a Healthier Heart

Want to be better able to cope with stress and have less anxiety and more positive emotions? Emphasizing these strategies may help improve your blood sugar, inflammatory and immune systems, stress and reproductive hormones, blood pressure and heart rhythms, and even your brain neurotransmitters.

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Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Leaked Emails Reveal Former Astronaut Wanted To Meet With Obama Official About Alien Life

People like me and my friends who have known about extraterrestrial information for many years now are happy about these leaked e-mails on the subject.  We think it's way past time for this information to be made public.

The truth is that extraterrestrials have been visiting us and working with world governments for many decades.  Several Presidents, including Eisenhower and Reagan, wanted to give this news to the public but were overruled by those who fear that the undeveloped consciousness of millions of Earth humans, especially that of the more conservative/religious types, is not ready for this revelation.  After seeing how many of this type are Trump voters in America and are those who voted for Brexit in the UK, I understand the concerns. 

Can you imagine the paranoid response of gun-toting evangelicals and white supremacist neo-Nazis in finding out we are not alone in the universe -- and that we are not the "greatest" and the "smartest"?  Scary to contemplate.  Just look at how willing they (along with Trump) are to hate any fellow Earth humans whom they consider to be "different" from themselves (different skin color, different religious beliefs, different sexual preference, etc., etc.).  At least half (and probably far more than that) of the people on Earth are still in nursery school, as concerns their understanding of life, the universe and our true nature and origins.  Still, the following leaked e-mails give some indication of the truth of the ET matter.

Intelligent people with open minds will hear this information as an introduction to what is actually true about ourselves and the universe. I think we Earth humans are slated to expand our consciousness in a much quicker manner than has been evidenced up till now.  Expanding ourselves to be global citizens is the first step -- and then, when ready, we can move on to the galactic level.  If interested, please read on:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/wikileaks-emails-aliens_us_57fd14b4e4b068ecb5e1eb1f?section=&

Leaked Emails Reveal Former Astronaut Wanted To Meet With Obama Official About Alien Life

Apollo 14's Edgar Mitchell was outspoken about his beliefs around extraterrestrial life forms.

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Good interview with Steve Schmidt, Republican campaign manager for John McCain, who calls Trump's campaign "kamikaze"

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/10/steve-schmidt-just-opened-a-massive-can-of-whoop-ass-on-desperate-trumps-kamikaze-campaign/

Steve defends John McCain against Trump's statement, "I wouldn't want to be in a foxhole with McCain."

I am not politically in accord with John McCain but I do recognize him as a war hero, something Trump does not.  I don't understand how any Republican (and especially armed service veterans) can vote for this FrankenTrump low-consciousness lowlife who isn't worthy to shine McCain's shoes, let alone be privileged to be in a foxhole with him.


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Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Good New Yorker article on Leonard Cohen

Leonard's voice/music has been my favorite for many years...This article tells about his life as it is progressed through the years and as it is now:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/leonard-cohen-makes-it-darker

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Monday, October 10, 2016

Robert Reich: WISHFUL THINKING

I'm with HIM!!! (~.~) Sure hope all the things on his wishful thinking list come to pass!

Wishful Thinking: First Hundred Days after November 8
by Robert Reich | October 9, 2016 - 6:15am

— from Robert Reich's Blog

1. Hillary Clinton is elected President.

2. Democrats take over the Senate, and reduce the Republican margin in the House to just 3 votes.

3. Elizabeth Warren announces she'll challenge Hillary in the 2020 Democratic primaries if Hillary isn't sufficiently progressive and bold during her first term.

4. The Democratic National Committee issues new rules eliminating "superdelegates" and requiring open primaries.

5. In her inaugural address, Hillary Clinton promises to "wrest back control of our democracy and economy from the moneyed interests that have taken over both."

6. President Hillary Clinton nominates Barack Obama to the Supreme Court, who immediately pledges to reverse "Citizens United." Senate Democrats make a rule change that allows Obama to be confirmed with 51 Senate votes. He is.

7. President Clinton nominates Bernie Sanders for Treasury Secretary and Michelle Obama for Attorney General. Both are immediately confirmed.

8. The chairman of the Republican Party officially repudiates Donald Trump, saying "shame on us for having nominated him." Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Pence appear in a joint news conference in which they apologize for having ever supported Trump.

9. Disgraced and with his brand in tatters, the value of Trump's properties drops 80 percent. His creditors demand that his personal assets – homes, planes, furniture, all he possesses – be liquidated to pay his bills.

10. Rupert Murdoch fires Sean Hannity from Fox News.
_______
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Saturday, October 08, 2016

REPUBLICANS: YOU KNEW WHO TRUMP WAS WHEN YOU NOMINATED HIM

YOU KNEW
By Jeffery Young

You knew. You all knew. You knew the whole time who and what Donald Trump is.

Mike Pence. Paul Ryan. Mitch McConnell. Ted Cruz. Chris Christie. Newt Gingrich. Orrin Hatch. John McCain. Marco RubioVirtually all of you. 

You heard every terrible thing he said. You watched every inexcusable thing he did. You knew Trump is a race-baiting, xenophobic, misogynistic, authoritarian con man. You knew about his insatiable appetite for power, his bottomless need for affirmation, his dangerous impulsiveness and uncontrollable temper. You knew he was a huckster who ruined businesses and lives. You knew he debased your party, and you personally. You knew.

You knew he waged a racist campaign against the president's legitimacy. You knew he called immigrants rapists. You knew he advocated forbidding Muslims from American soil. You knew he said a federal judge wasn't qualified becauseMexican blood flowed through his veins. You knew he besmirched the parents of a dead soldier. You knew he mocked prisoners of war. You knew he courted white supremacists. You knew he admires dictators. You knew he incited violence. You knew he lies ― blatantly, shamelessly, ceaselessly.

You knew all of that, and you asked Americans to elect him president anyway. Shame on you. You knew.

Your condemnations are and have always been empty. Your sudden rush to abandon Trump ― after what's merely the most recently uncovered manifestation of his hatred for women ― is motivated by the same venal cowardice that led you to support him in the first place.

You knew Hillary Clinton isn't the monstrous caricature you spent decades depicting. You knew she is ― like each and every one of you ― an ordinary politician, in all the ways that word has positive and negative connotations. You knew she would govern in a perfectly normal way.

You knew this, but you told voters she was more dangerous than Trump. More evil. A greater threat to the republic. And this, after so many of you spent the presidential primary campaign warning the U.S. that Trump is exactly who he appears to be. But you fell in line. You knew, and you endorsed him anyway.

You did all of this in service of ideology. You did this because you believe Trump will enact the policies you favor to allow businesses to pump more pollution into our air and water, to take away food and medicine from the neediest among us, to disenfranchise minority voters, to slash taxes for the rich.

Your voters elevated Trump nearly to the White House, and he may yet make it there, in spite of everything. They did so because you have primed them for Trump for more than half a century. Half a century of barely concealed appeals to racism, of fomenting fear and hatred and coaxing the worst instincts out of enough voters to gain power. Years of nurturing ― on AM radio and cable TV and the internet ― a propaganda machine that encourages ignorance, mistrust and anger.

You have lost control of the golem you created.  

You made promises you knew you couldn't keep, and your voters finally lost faith in you. Now, they're turning on you.

They follow a man who doesn't even share your beliefs. You're learning just how little those voters cared about conservatism and how very much they cared about stomping their boots on the throats of people who don't look like them or love like them or think like them. You made this possible by making villains out of African-Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ people, the poor.

When this is all over, you may win your own re-elections. You may retain control of Congress and of governors mansions, state legislatures, county councils and school boards all across the nation. You may sigh in relief that you survived. You may even ― and not terribly long from now ― regain the presidency and resume carrying out your agenda. Your own careers may be successful. 

But history will condemn you. History won't forget your callowness. Because you knew.

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Tuesday, October 04, 2016

Humorous moment on FOX news this morning

The long-haired, long-legged Fox women with short skirts and high, high heels were all sitting with legs crossed to reveal their thighs, discussing Trump and his main supporters in Ohio.  They obviously had been coached not to use the term "uneducated" but instead to say, "white men who don't have a college degree."  As one of the women was reading from her notes, she unintentionally started to say "the uned...." and quickly switched to "white men without a college degree."  It's also obvious that the women on FOX are uncomfortable having to support Trump and they do it with very little expression and no enthusiasm.  I would bet a lot of money that when they enter the voting booth, their votes will NOT be for Trump.

As for the uneducated white men who are flocking in droves to support Trump, he has already declared his love for them when he happily declared at one rally, "I love the poorly educated!"  And well he should, because they make up the majority of his Pied Piper followers, with just a very few of more intelligent Republicans strewn here and there among their number (and why those brighter people are still there with the ugly clown in that very dark circus tent I have never been able to figure out!) 

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Icarus Trump and the Long Fall

Not that any of Trump's supporters care that he has been stiffing little people like them for decades -- hard-working people who did the jobs he hired them to do and then were refused pay by the FrankenTrump monster. As Republican right wingers tend to do, they probably figure, "Well, it wasn't ME he stiffed. They should have been more careful of the way they conduct their business." As long as it doesn't affect them or their family, they are OK with whatever is done out there in the world where Trump conducts HIS business.  Of course, Trump had a good reason for not paying the little people whose services he used.  Read about his reason in this excerpt from the article I've included in toto below:

"Trump is notorious for
stiffing contractors who provide services for him. There are dozens of lawsuits pending against him for just that, and more stories appear every day. Trump even stiffed the caterer who successfully managed his wedding to Marla Maples. His pattern in this was as simple as it was sinister: "I know you are new at this," he is alleged to have said, "and when you tell people you catered my wedding, you will get more business than you could ever dream of. So I am doing you a favor. And when I do favors, I don't pay. End of discussion."

"When threatened with a lawsuit by those he refused to pay, Trump would tell the aggrieved party to go right ahead; a suit would cost more than the bill in question. One wonders if there is an enterprising lawyer out there willing to pull all these people together into a class-action lawsuit against Trump. Even better, perhaps an eager prosecutor could put together a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act case against him. This isn't a one-off here and there; it is a years-long pattern of fraud that has left a long trail of very angry, financially damaged people in its wake."

Mr. Law and Order indeed.


Icarus J. Trump and the Long Fall
by William Rivers Pitt | October 4, 2016 - 8:37am

— from Truthout

"There are 8 million stories in the Naked City," intoned the narrator of the 1948 film noir masterpiece of the same name. The same can be said for the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Actually, 8 million stories may be too low a number. Take this past Friday, for example. After a week of thrashing about trying to pretend Secretary Hillary Clinton didn't eat his lunch during Monday's debate, Trump got hold of his phone and went on an all-night Twitter rampage. A post at 10:16 pm Thursday night was followed by subsequent Friday morning screeds at 3:20 am, 5:14 am, 5:19 am and 5:30 am before he trailed off at 8:50 am with one last wail about sources and beauty pageants and sex tapes.

Does the man sleep? Or does he hang upside down in the belfry of Trump Tower like some anthropomorphic orange bat, tweeting madly while his aides try to knock the phone out of his hands with long poles and lobbed fistfuls of old brie? That's just one story. The vast collection of all the others accumulated during this deranged toboggan ride could very well hedge the definition of infinity.

Therein, however, lies the magic of it, the genius, even if it is all completely unintended. Trump is the SUU-11A Gatling mini-gun of politics, capable of laying down 6,000 rounds of ammunition in one minute. The mini-gun can denude a forest with a couple of sweeps of its spinning, fire-spitting barrel. Trump managed to lay the entire corporate "news" media low with the same degree of firepower. He wasn't firing lead, however; he was firing nonsense and bedlam.

A typical week of Trump coverage, only slightly embellished: Last night, Trump tweeted that Clinton intends to sell the Sixth Fleet to Iran as reports swirled that he used money from his charitable foundation to pay for a giant golden calf made of hairs taken from his own comb, but here's some breaking news about yet another caterer he stiffed on a job while tweeting his theories on how President Obama was born on Neptune and flew here like Superman, but is so selfish that he won't use his superpowers to destroy ISIS … what's that, Bob? Trump bribed an attorney general and ran a fake college and solicited campaign donations from foreign leaders and is in bed with Russian President Vladmir Putin and violated the Cuba embargo and his money-laundering charity foundation isn't allowed to collect donations and he lost a billion dollars while maybe paying no taxes? Oh, I give up. Let's talk about Clinton's health for a week after we check in on the Pitt-Jolie divorce.

They call the man "Master Troll" for a reason. Every time some supposedly campaign-ending shoe drops, Trump slings six lesser shoes out the window that make the media scatter like geese. Deliberate, or merely a happy accident born of manic self-delusion on the part of this wholly naked emperor? In the end, it doesn't matter. Trump has somehow managed over the last year to make Teflon look like flypaper by comparison. The sheer number of stories has been, amazingly, the rock that gives him shelter.

All that, however, may be coming to a conclusion at speed. Trump and the "news" media may be spending their time on Miss Universe for the moment, but legal officials in a variety of districts are looking long and hard at his highly questionable business practices. The much-ballyhooed Trump Foundation, according to a bombshell report by The Washington Post, lacks the certification required by charities to collect money. Even under the most lenient of circumstances, Trump may get fined and be forced to return all those donations. Dovetail that with the myriad reports of his serial misuse of those charity funds, and suddenly he's got some pretty heavy potential criminal charges staring him dead in the face. He brazenly flouted the embargo against Cuba, another breach of the law, and had his surrogates go on TV to call it no big deal. Yeah, he did it. It's called business, which makes him smart.

Oh, and not for nothing, but Trump is notorious for stiffing contractors who provide services for him. There are dozens of lawsuits pending against him for just that, and more stories appear every day. Trump even stiffed the caterer who successfully managed his wedding to Marla Maples. His pattern in this was as simple as it was sinister: "I know you are new at this," he is alleged to have said, "and when you tell people you catered my wedding, you will get more business than you could ever dream of. So I am doing you a favor. And when I do favors, I don't pay. End of discussion."

When threatened with a lawsuit by those he refused to pay, Trump would tell the aggrieved party to go right ahead; a suit would cost more than the bill in question. One wonders if there is an enterprising lawyer out there willing to pull all these people together into a class-action lawsuit against Trump. Even better, perhaps an eager prosecutor could put together a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act case against him. This isn't a one-off here and there; it is a years-long pattern of fraud that has left a long trail of very angry, financially damaged people in its wake.

Mr. Law and Order indeed.

The ancient Greeks were masterful at telling tales of doom by hubris. Trump calls to mind Icarus, who flew too close to the sun with waxen wings and fell to his death in the sea. It is almost amusing: Had Trump decided not to run for president, it is almost certain that none of these terrible stories would have come to light, and he could have merrily continued practicing the dark art of being a greedy self-centered jerk until his dying day.

Instead, he lurched for the sun, and now his whole empire is under close scrutiny. The scab is off the wound. Even if he wins in November, which is hardly out of the question, that scrutiny won't cease. Donald Trump may wind up being the first president to be impeached before he learns how to use the phone in the Oval Office. I wonder if his kids are worried about their inheritance. I would be. Remember Wile E. Coyote going off the cliff while holding a sign that read, "Was this trip really necessary?" It's fairly certain a number of people associated with the campaign are thinking exactly that … while wondering if they'll actually get paid.

It's a long way down, Donald. Icarus can tell you all about it. Maybe your wings should have been made of sterner stuff. Maybe you should have simply stayed home. Just another story in Hubris City.
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Monday, October 03, 2016

Newest Twitter racist terms of far right wing

So they won't be banned by Twitter, here are the new code words the Trump supporters are using on Twitter in order to keep from being banned.  Most important for all Trump supporters to know so they can continue their bigotry unimpeded by moral codes the rest of us follow.  (I guess they still call themselves "Christians.")

As you can see, the alt-righters now refer to black people as "googles," Jews as "skypes," Latinos as "yahoos," and Asians as "bings." In tribute to Donald Trump Jr., they also refer to Muslims as "skittles," which is the candy that the younger Trump compared to Syrian refugees in an infamous meme he posted.

And of course, they also have derogatory nicknames for members of the LGBT community and for any political ideology that does not match up with their own.

So if you're on Twitter and you see some random person call you a "skype butterfly car salesman," you should know you're being attacked with bigoted code words.

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/10/here-are-the-racist-code-words-trumps-twitter-fans-are-now-using-to-avoid-getting-banned/

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Sunday, October 02, 2016

Good article -- sadly, won't be recognized that way by Trump voters


EXCERPT:  If you're inclined to deny statements that the majority know to be true, then Trump's message is appealing. By disputing facts and verifiable research, he validates society's fecklessness faction by speaking to people who, like him, can't be bothered to learn the facts.

Trump's campaign is a carnival of ignorance that would have gone nowhere if more Americans had done some due diligence about his past and his character.

Instead, Trump is living proof of the inexplicable willingness of many Americans to reject factual knowledge.

His campaign arises partly from what Stanford historian Robert N. Proctor has dubbed "agnotology," defined as "culturally constructed ignorance, purposefully created by special interest groups working hard to create confusion and suppress the truth."   Trump's agnotology won't work in the real world of international politics, the economy and national security. In office, his merit badge of ignorance would tarnish pretty fast.

TRUMP'S CAMPAIGN AND THE RISE OF WILLFUL IGNORANCE

By Dan Leger

A crowd listens to republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speak at Spooky Nook Sports Complex in Manheim, Pa., Saturday, Oct. 1. (James Robinson/PennLive.com via AP)

It's an unwritten rule of politics and life that we generally don't blame people for their ignorance, at least when it's not their own fault. But we don't respect those who wear ignorance like a merit badge, because they're holding everyone back.

Ignorance is something that shouldn't be learned. But a willful form of it seems to be taking hold out there and it threatens to undermine a lot that is good about our liberal democracies.

This self-inflicted ignorance has produced Donald Trump as its knight in white armor and he campaigns on the ignorance platform. Trump employs knowledge denial in ways that were, until now, unseen in politics. His entire pitch is based on phony factoids.

Trump's big promise is to clamp down on criminal immigrants. Yet there are no credible statistics proving that immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans, as Trump claims. Nor is there a credible study proving foreigners take jobs from American workers, but he says that every day too.

Trump would abandon international trade agreements because they're all "bad deals." But while not unanimous, most economists agree that liberalized trade benefits the United States economy and its workers.

Contrary to what Trump says, the U.S. is not a hellscape of poverty and violence. Crime is decreasing and most Americans are better off now than when Barack Obama became president in 2008. Employment, even in manufacturing, is at a record high. Poverty is on the wane.

Trump's lies often have racial overtones, like his multi-year denial that Obama was born in the U.S. Now Trump claims that Hillary Clinton started the rumours. And no, the Chinese did not invent climate change to further some weird goal of theirs.

Trump's campaign is a carnival of ignorance that would have gone nowhere if more Americans had done some due diligence about his past and his character.

Instead, Trump is living proof of the inexplicable willingness of many Americans to reject factual knowledge.

His campaign arises partly from what Stanford historian Robert N. Proctor has dubbed "agnotology," defined as "culturally constructed ignorance, purposefully created by special interest groups working hard to create confusion and suppress the truth."

Agnotology works to undermine public confidence in reason and science. The best example might be the tobacco industry's use of knowledge-suppression techniques to weaken public understanding of the link between cigarette smoking and cancer.

Climate science skeptics use pseudo-factual information to blunt scientific warnings about the effects of atmospheric carbon emissions.

Culturally constructed ignorance is at the root of the anti-vaccine movement that endangers the lives of people, especially children, around the world.

And it enables politicians to claim that tax cuts for the rich, another Trump proposal, will create jobs for the working classes when they don't do any such thing.

Admittedly, not everyone is comfortable with science or data. Many people aren't sure what to think when there are uncertainties or conflicting evidence about something as complicated as climate science.

Meanwhile the skeptics get prominent media coverage of their make-believe issues, based on the poorly applied principle of journalistic balance.

That's how Trump graduated from real estate promoter to would-be statesman and presidential candidate. The media felt obliged to give his views an airing because Americans were taking them, and him, seriously.

That was enough to make Trump a factor in media coverage of the presidential campaign.

If you're inclined to deny statements that the majority know to be true, then Trump's message is appealing. By disputing facts and verifiable research, he validates society's fecklessness faction by speaking to people who, like him, can't be bothered to learn the facts.

But Trump's agnotology won't work in the real world of international politics, the economy and national security. In office, his merit badge of ignorance would tarnish pretty fast.

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