8:11:14 AM 12/21/2016
https://youtu.be/w1R_6E5YXRE
And A Happy Solstice To All
Hey there! Happy Winter Solstice! It’s the shortest day of the year, among other things, which means that from here on out the days start getting longer. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? We certainly hope it is. And we’re still looking at warming temperatures as we head toward the Christmas/Hanukkah weekend so hopefully travel problems will be few.
As we look at the news this morning, there is still a lot of clean up from Monday’s events. Police in Germany released the person they initially thought was the driver of the truck that slammed into a holiday market in Berlin and a manhunt is underway. Russia has doubled down on its relationship with Turkey. And officials in Geneva said that the person who shot up a mosque there was not a Muslim extremist. Those situations are likely to be ongoing for a while. So, our five things you should know this morning takes us in a slightly different direction.
And then things went boom
By now, if you’ve been on social media much at all, you’ve likely seen the video a passerby took yesterday as the San Pablito fireworks market in Mexico exploded yesterday1. While the site was a spectacular event to watch, the death toll in that chain reaction explosion now stands at 29, with 72 still being treated for injuries. Some of those injured have burns over 90 percent of their body.
There is no word yet as to who or what might have caused the explosion. Inventory at the market was higher than usual because of the upcoming holidays. The fireworks market is an integral part of the local economy and something that is carefully guarded. However, this is not the first time that the San Pablito market has gone up in flames. A similar incident in May of 2005 did a similar amount of damage, though fewer lives were lost in that explosion.
Amidst the chaos of the explosions and huge plumes of smoke, survivors ran for the nearest exit, many becoming separated from their families and leaving behind personal items such as cell phones. Relatives are still scrambling to find those who are missing. Sadly, explosions like this are all-too-common an occurrence in Mexico, especially around holidays and religious festivals. Yesterday’s explosion, however, was the worst the country has seen in several years.
Someone has to take responsibility
With tragedy inevitably come lawsuits as victims’ families look to hold someone, somewhere, responsible for the event that took the life of a loved one. Such is the case in Orlando as the families of three men killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting filed papers in Detroit federal court on Monday naming major social media companies Facebook, Twitter, and Google saying that the companies “provided the terrorist group ISIS with accounts they use to spread extremist propaganda, raise funds and attract new recruits.”2
While the grief of the families involved is understandable, one has to wonder if this is not yet again a case of an over-zealous attorney either trying to make a name for themselves or bilking the grieving families out of thousands of dollars in attorneys fees. The families would have to prove intentional and deliberate collusion on the part of the social media giants to win their case, something that is not likely to happen. Pile First Amendment arguments on top of that and the lawsuit is practically dead in the water before it ever starts.
While only Facebook responded to the lawsuit yesterday, the issue of shutting down the accounts of known terrorist cells has been a primary project for every social media outlet over the past couple of years. Twitter was very public back in August when it announced that it had deleted 360,000 accounts since mid-2015 for violating policies related to promotion of terrorism. All three companies, along with Microsoft, are part of a joint effort to prevent known terrorist accounts from proliferating online. Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act protects software companies from speech users post on their sites, making the lawsuit against them even more improbable.
Our sympathies are with the families of the victims, but this lawsuit is nothing but desperate foolishness.
American Apparel is dying
Anyone who once shopped the big malls across the country knows the name American Apparel. They’ve been a mainstay of malls everywhere for over 30 years. However, the retail market has not been nice toward mall-based chains and American Apparel has spent the past several months in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings trying desperately to keep the brand alive. Yesterday, however, a judge agreed to allow the store to close nine locations and approved a liquidation plan should a buyer not be found within a reasonable timeframe.3
The nine stores, which are among some of the brand’s highest profile locations in Atlanta and Dallas, may just be the tip of the iceberg. The entire chain goes up for auction next month, and Gildan Activewear has already set a starting bid of $106 million. However, Gildan is not required to follow through on that bid and analyst are pessimistic about any other buyers attempting to save all 107 locations.
What this means for shoppers is multiple rounds of clearance sales as the company begins divesting itself of as much inventory as possible. However, it is also a warning sign as other mall retailers are beginning to hire bankruptcy attorneys. Fast fashion retailers such as H&M and Zara have taken much of the fire out of mall stores and that entire sector of the industry has been in steep decline for five years now. Expect more fashion-oriented stores to fall over the next two years.
Bobbie Brown exits stage left
The beauty world was caught off guard yesterday as Bobbie Brown, founder of the incredibly popular Bobbie Brown cosmetics line, announced she is stepping away from the brand at the end of the year4. Ms. Brown did not say exactly what she was going to do next. She told WWD that the celebration of brand’s 25th anniversary was a milestone “that made me realize it was time to start a new chapter and move on to new ventures.”
The 59-year-old makeup artist certainly has plenty of options available to her as she has dabbled in a variety of closely-related ventures over the years. The brand itself is owned by Estee Lauder and will continue operating under Peter Lichtenthal, global brand president. Ms. Brown is known for being energetic and creative so it will be interesting to see just where she might apply her incredible talent next.
And Finally …
President Obama may have found something that the incoming administration can’t undo upon its arrival next month. Yesterday, the president banned new oil and gas drilling in federal waters in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, a move that, understandably makes environmentalists extremely happy5. The move protects nearly 120 million acres of coastal waters controlled jointly by both the United States and Canada.
Normally, we might throw some shade at the move on the expectation that the next president would simply revoke the ruling using the same Presidential power with which it was made. However, this is one instance where the ruling is almost permanent. The president utilized the little-known Outer Continental Shelf Act that allows presidents to limit areas from mineral leasing and drilling. If Mr. Trump attempts to reverse President Obama’s move, he could only do so through a series of lawsuits that would likely take longer to get through the courts than his administration would be in place.
At the same time, it’s not like anyone has been chomping at the bit to drill in the Arctic waters. Shell Oil was the last company to give it a try and they abandoned those efforts after a tanker lost several thousand gallons of crude thanks to a giant gash in its side caused by ice flows in the area. Drilling there is extremely expensive compared to land-based operations. Still, the American Petroleum Institute criticized the move. The president-elect’s transition team has not yet responded.
We’re running incredibly late this morning, so we’ll have to end the conversation there for now. As always, we hope you’ll stay warm and safe. Don’t forget to subscribe, and we’ll be back with more tomorrow.
Habitat Loss and Degradation
What A Fool Believes
What he sees he don’t believe
The Short Version
While the president and those sympathetic to him rant on about fake news and lying reporters, the true onus is on citizens who are far too willing to believe anything they read or hear based on their existing biases. If the narrative of a story supports their belief system, a person is more likely to believe something at face value without checking for validation of the source.
The Dirty Details
I have been a fan of the rock group The Doobie Brothers since I was in high school, which as a very, very long time ago. One of the band’s biggest hits, penned by Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald, is What A Fool Believes. The song is about a guy who refuses to accept that the girl for whom he longs wasn’t into him back in the day and he still doesn’t stand a chance now. Yet, he keeps believing, despite all the evidence to the contrary. He, therefore, is a fool.
The song is catchy enough to make abject desperation sound attractive. Take a listen.
I’m going to guess that anyone over 30, maybe younger depending on one’s life experience, knows someone like this. You can’t tell them anything. They have their mind made up, whether it’s about a girl or the quality of food at a restaurant or how “dope” their first car was. We see them trying to get a girl they’ll never get, or still trying to relive 1979, and we just shake our heads. There’s nothing anyone can do to sway their course.
When a fool latches onto a belief, they don’t let go no matter how much evidence to the contrary one presents them with. Facts are irrelevant. Like the guy in the song, they keep replaying the fantasy in their mind and even as she stands up to walk away, he doesn’t realize his mistake. Fools never do. They’re blind to what is so obvious to everyone else.
Part of the problem with people like this is that we have always tolerated their foolishness. So he wants to pine for a girl that he can’t have. Okay, just let it go. What harm can it do to let him have that fantasy?
Yet, one fantasy leads to another. Fools surround themselves with the tales they want to hear, blocking out reality piece by piece until they are totally out of touch and disconnected. Eventually, they are no longer able to function within society. At that point, we often stop calling them fools and start calling them crazy, which is a bit insulting to people with real mental illness. With such a strong disconnect from reality, these people become a danger to themselves and others.
How bad can it get? Let me show you what happens when a fool is confronted with reality (with apologies should an ad run in front of the embedded video):
See what he did there? The deflection is first, “Well, that was just information that was given to me,” and then seconds later, “I saw it around somewhere.”
Let’s not be confused by the facts, is what the president means to say. He doesn’t even get the number of his own electoral college votes correct. For the record, that number is 304, not 306, and yes, it matters because it’s the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie. As for the claim that his victory was the biggest? Again, let’s not engage in any form of information other than the facts:
That last one, Bush Sr.’s 462 electoral votes, is especially important because the president attempts to head off the reporter’s facts by saying interrupting with “among Republicans.” No sir, not even among Republicans.
One has to wonder why the president continues to engage in this electoral college penis measuring contest when time after time he’s proven to lose. His victory is not the largest. Not even close.
Oh yeah, the song explains that, doesn’t it?
He came from somewhere back in here long ago
The sentimental fool don’t see
Tryin’ hard to recreate what had yet to be created
Repetition. That’s the name of the game. Building off the concept that if one repeats a lie often enough that it becomes truth, the president and those around him continue to claim their victory was large because they want the lie to become truth. Repeat. Rewind. Repeat. Rewind.
Fools believe some incredible things and we’ve tolerated them for years and years. Only now, with fools in charge of the government, what a fool believes can actually put the rest of us in danger.
Let’s take, for example, the whole concept that we need clean drinking water to live. Only a fool would believe anything different, right? The amount of evidence is overwhelming. I mean, all we have to do is point toward Flint, Michigan as an example, right?
But then, THIS happened just this week:
Because, you know, who needs clean water when it puts a few hundred (not thousands) of jobs at risk?
What a fool believes, he sees
No wise man has the power
To reason away
What it seems to be
Is always better than nothin’
And nothin’ at all
Foolishness isn’t limited only to certain heads of state, of course. There are fools all over the place saying all kinds of crazy things. Let’s consider this fool for a moment:
Take a really good look at those pictures. I dare you. Try to not laugh too hard, I’d hate for you to hurt yourself. If you think you’re seeing a depiction of really burly humans fighting really small dinosaurs in gladiator-style combat, you’re not mistaken. That would be exactly what Ken Ham and the fools at Ark Encounter believe.
Never mind that dinosaurs were extinct more than 64 million years before homo sapiens ever began evolving, let alone learned how to work out and get all buff. Fools can’t be bothered with things like science because it gets in the way of their fantasy. In fact, fools like this do their best to demonize science so that they can believe whatever the hell they want without those nasty little facts spoiling their totally unrealistic story.
Now, it would be one thing if we were pulling stories from, say, twenty-five years ago. Something pre-Internet where there was no wealth of factual information not only at your fingertips but sufficiently indexed so that you can find it in a reasonable amount of time. AKA: the Dark Ages. We’re not going that far back, though. Everything I’ve mentioned so far has happened this week! And guess what? I’m not done! There’s still more!
This next one really pains me a bit because it involves someone whose work I’ve respected for a very long time. I’m going to post a video that is over an hour long. Watch as much of it as you wish. However, be very much aware that these are fools talking.
https://youtu.be/DqWhzKewILk
Please, allow me to fast forward through the horseshit for you. What is being claimed here is that vaccines, you know the shots we get starting at birth to prevent really horrible and deadly disease, are dangerous. So dangerous, in fact, that famed actor Robert De Niro, and cousin that always pops up looking for free food Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., are offering a $100,000 reward for anyone who can “prove” that vaccines are safe.
Dear Mr. DeNiro, Here’s your proof: How many people do you know with polio? None, correct? There’s your proof that the vaccine works. Please give Dr. Jonas Salk the reward. Okay, since he’s not around, perhaps the Salk Legacy Foundation could use the funds. The science has endured over 60 years of continued research and still shows to be effective in defending us against disease.
Now, does every vaccine work with such a high rate of efficacy? Nope. We’re not silly enough to believe that, either. What we do believe, though, is that, among the general population, vaccines are the best way of preventing common forms of disease.
What’s scary about this particular set of fools is that they’ve been telling this same lie, perpetuating this same fantasy, for so very long now that people whose opinions we once respected are being taken in. If otherwise intelligent beings can be fooled, what does that do to the very large portion of the population for whom intelligence is a pipe dream? Those are the ones who fail to vaccinate their children, thereby putting all the other children around them at risk. These people aren’t just fools, these people are dangerous!
There are times when I am tempted to think that the Internet is nothing more than one giant tabloid. The kind of things that fools are willing to believe is extensive and, quite honestly, embarrassing to the human race. When we have mountains of evidence supporting the facts and we still refuse to believe them, can our own extinction be very far behind? I remember laughing at the people we would see picking up tabloids at the grocery. I can’t laugh at all the people reading the same kind of nonsense on the Internet because there’s too many of them! I’d crack a rib from laughing if it wasn’t so scary at the same time.
What gets me is that young people, people who have had the opportunity to be educated in such matters, are still believing in some of the same fairy tales that were common when I was a kid. Again, sticking with things that happened just this week.
No, I didn’t blur the names. Fools need to be called out on their foolishness. Part of what bothers me is that this is such an old myth and has been disproven so many times that it isn’t even funny. Yet, just as with everything else we’ve listed, people are still believing this nonsense. The whole issue of chemtrails goes back to 1958 when NASA started using lithium in the launch of certain rockets in order to better observe certain atmospheric conditions. Conspiracy theorists twisted the science and ran with it.
NASA is now and always has been very open about the vapor trails they use, what’s in them, the amounts used, and why the use is necessary. They have an entire section of their website devoted to this funny thing we keep mentioning called the facts.
What might be even more disturbing from Amee’s post, however, is the belief shared by many like her that the government is trying to kill us. Kill us all. Dead. I have some problems with this concept.
First, if jet vapor is the means of dispersal for whatever poison is being spread among us, it’s not working. We are, generally speaking, living longer and healthier than any generation before us. So much so, in fact, that the leading causes of death in the US are our own fault due to silly things such as overeating and lack of exercise. We are doing a much better job of killing ourselves than the government is.
I’ve been watching jet vapor trails since I was a small boy. If anyone was in a position to be poisoned at an early age, it would be me. Yet, here I am, perhaps not the healthiest person in the world, but what ails me is in no way the result of any kind of external poisoning, either by the government or that cook I accidentally insulted back in SoHo.
The nonsense surrounding ways in which the government is allegedly trying to poison us is nothing short of insane. Do a quick search and you see claims that the government is really heavily involved in this whole trying to kill us scheme. They’re allegedly using:
On and on this list goes and it leaves the logical mind thinking that if the government really is trying to poison then, they’re really, really bad at it. Why would I say that? We’re all still alive. We have more centenarians living now than at any time in the past two thousand years. In fact, we’re so very good at staying alive that we have exceeded the planet’s level of sustainability for all of us. We passed that point back in 2009.
Oh, and let’s not bother thinking about the lack of logic in trying to solve the world’s overpopulation problems by killing off Americans. The population of the United States is largely insignificant on a global scale that encompasses some 7.5 BILLION people. Now, for those of you who are not stellar at math, the current US population is only around 375 million, so we don’t even take up the .5 in the global calculation. If one is going to perform a mass genocide in the name of sustainability, one needs to start on a different, more populous continent.
She musters a smile for his nostalgic tale
Never comin’ near what he wanted to say
Only to realize
It never really was
The frightening thing at this juncture is that the list of fools goes on and on. We’ve not even touched on those who still believe things such as trickle-down economics or that a “paleo” diet is healthy. There are hundreds of belief systems that are nothing more than pure foolishness and believed by pure fools. Trying to list them all would be exhausting and, quite honestly, I have better things to do.
People whose wisdom far surmounts mine have written of fools before. Perhaps we would do well to heed their advice:
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere. -Voltaire
Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something. -Plato
The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places. -Bryant H. McGill
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. -Bertrand Russell
Wise men don’t need advice. Fools won’t take it. -Benjamin Franklin
The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite. -Arthur Schopenhauer
And then, there’s the Doobie Brothers, who know what a fool believes. And every time there’s a White House press conference now, I keep hearing that song in the back of my mind.
Immediately followed by this:
When will they ever learn?
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