Pun Salad

New York Attorney General Letitia James has investigated former President Donald Trump and his real-estate business for over a year. The probe, conducted in conjunction with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, began as a civil investigation before James announced last May that it had become criminal.

Today, Trump was forced to sit for a deposition at James' Manhattan office. In a statement, he indicated that he had "declined to answer the questions," invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to be forced to incriminate oneself.

The invocation marked a notable break from Trump's previous thoughts on taking the Fifth, most notably during the 2016 campaign: During a presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, he called it "disgraceful" that members of her staff had refused to testify before congressional committees investigating Clinton's use of a private email server. Days later, he told a rally crowd, "The mob takes the Fifth. If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?"

For decades, working-class White voters were the base of the Democratic Party. So it was no surprise that U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas, facing a tough re-election environment in a district rated a “toss-up” by political pros, made working-class men the stars of his first 2022 TV ad.

Take the rugged guy rolling up the door at the auto repair shop in the first few seconds of the ad. He looks out at the city, ready for another day of honest labor and hard work in the shop.

Now, take another look at him. That is actually Alan Raff, a white-collar attorney who works in a Concord law office and is chairman of the Manchester Democrats. He formerly worked in the offices of the New Hampshire Senate as a Democratic staffer.

In this piece, Scientific American author Camilio Garzón (it’s an article, not an op-ed) interviews Rebecca Charbonneau, identified as “a historian in residence at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, as well as a Jansky Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.”

Charbonneau’s thesis:

. . . .increasingly, SETI scientists are grappling with the disquieting notion that, much like their intellectual forebears, their search may somehow be undermined by biases they only dimly perceive—biases that could, for instance, be related to the misunderstanding and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups that occurred during the development of modern astronomy and many other scientific fields.

Yep, Scientific American is rapidly descending to the status of a risible, woke, and useless publication. I used to read it avidly when I was a kid, but back then it was full of science. Now, like Teen Vogue, it’s a disguised way to propagandize its readers.

There’s a popular saying among religious apologists:

Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.

Big talk, although I notice that this is practically always attributed to one of GK Chesterton or CS Lewis, neither of whom actually said it. If you’re making strong claims about how everybody except you is gullible, you should at least bother to double-check the source of your quote.

Still, it’s worth examining as a hypothesis. Are the irreligious really more likely to fall prey to woo and conspiracy theories?