Category Archives: The Sleep of Reason

The War on Smart

politics, Skeptical Philosophy, The Sleep of Reason

 

Late night comedians are smart. At least they are smart enough to gather together a diverse collection of funny people. And when they smell ignorance, they smell funny. Recently this was proved by the actions of Donald Trump. Actually, this has happened many times, but it certainly happened when Donald Trump declared war on brains. One of those actions—there are actually many—was the dismissal of basically all of the Department of Education. After all who needs education. Trump’s sons didn’t need no education!

 

As Jimmy Kimmel said, “Trump famously said he loves the poorly educated, and now he will have so many more people to love.” Supposedly that is what it means to say ignorance is bliss.

 

Kimmel also said this: “Trump signed the order [gutting the Department of Education] during an event at the White House. They invited  like ‘Hey kids, who hates school?’  And they’re like ‘Well we all do!’  And they said, ‘Well, good news, it’s over.’

 

One more comment from Kimmel:  “The idea behind this is to let the states come up with their own educational standards. For instance, from here one, in order to receive a high school diploma in Florida, all you have to do is complete the maze on the back of the kids’ menu at Fuddruckers.”

 

Jimmy Fallon said this, “Today, President Trump signed an executive order to shut down the Department of Education. It’s a historic move that years from now kids will not read about in history books.”

 

Greg Gutfeld said, “President Trump signed an order today to dismantle the Department of Education. Yep. Soon employees will be reading their pink slips at a third-grade level.”

 

Yes, in the good ole USA, famous the world over for the strength of its universities is turning to dumb. Dumb on steroids.  And this is no accident. That is what Trump and the Dumpsters want—ignorance.  They want dumb! They want it. And they’ll get it. Kimmel was right when he called it “a confederacy of dunces.”

 

Why does Trump want dumb?  I think Hannah Arendt had the answer::

 

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

 

Trump, like most totalitarians likes dumb!

 

Mennonites Lead the Charge Against Health Protections

Death of Truth, Health, reason, The Sleep of Reason, Vaccines

 

I used to joke that Mennonites are taking over the world. It’s actually true. And its not a good thing. It’s actually very dangerous. But it is preventable by vaccines. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases in the world. And we have not been taking it seriously, because we have been so effective at combating it. And that is all thanks to vaccines for measles.

 

The United States has just experienced a measles outbreak in the American southwest, particularly in Texas. On February 26, 2025 for the first time in 20 years a child died of Measles in Texas. It was also the first time in nearly a decade in the US. Texas confirmed it had 124 cases mostly in Gaines County and 9 cases in Lea County New Mexico.

 

Here’s the shocking part:

“Most of the cases are occurring in a Mennonite community that largely homeschools, so there would not be school vaccine mandates,” explains Bill Moss, MD, MPH, a professor in Epidemiology and executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center.”

 

You see most schools in the US mandate that children enrolled in the school must be vaccinated against measles. Mennonites in these communities mainly homeschool. And these homes don’t get their children vaccinated.  As Mennonites sometimes say, “We trust in God. We don’t need vaccines.” They think God is stronger than any disease and all they need to do is appeal to God. Sadly, that’s not working so well.

 

As Aliza Rosen of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said,

 

“At a time of rampant mis- and disinformation about vaccines, public health experts worry outbreaks like this may only become more common in a time of rampant mis- and disinformation about vaccines, public health experts worry outbreaks like this may only become more common.”

 

As Dr. Ron Cook, of Texas Tech University said on PBS News Hour,

 

“If you walk into a room and you have measles, 80 to 90 percent of those individuals within a week will come down with measles. All you have to do is go in that room, breathe, cough a couple of times, but 80 to 90 percent of those individuals in that room will become infected with measles if they’re not vaccinated.”

 

Even though the vast majority of Americans and Canadians believe in the safety and effectiveness and safety of vaccines, there are growing numbers of people who are skeptical about vaccines, unvaccinated people account for the almost all the new cases of measles. And sadly, those numbers include children.

 

As Caitlan Rivers, Senior Scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, pointed out,

“In fact, 93 percent of people are vaccinated against measles. That is an enormous congruency in a population that otherwise can’t agree on a whole lot.”

 

Rivers also said she was troubled by misinformation coming from the newly Trump appointed secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has made it clear that he questions vaccines.  All of us should question vaccines, but when we get clear answers from a wide majority of scientists and researchers, we should believe them until we learn for some reason they can’t be trusted. Unfortunately, many Mennonites in some communities don’t trust in the science. They do their own research on line or have faith.

 

Dr. Paul Offit, an expert on vaccines and one of the  committee advisers and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said,

 

“I just fear that we are slowly sort of tearing apart the public health process that has basically served us well. I mean, we live 30 years longer than we did 100 years ago, primarily because of vaccines. And I just think vaccines have become, I think, following this pandemic, to some, a dirty word.”

 

Dr. Offit, like Caitlan Rivers lays a lot of blame at the feet of people like Robert F. Kennedy for spreading misinformation about vaccines that has influenced people like the home-schooling Mennonites. This is what he said:

 

“So, if you look at that Mennonite community, about 80 percent of those children were vaccinated. That’s not enough. It has to be in the mid-95 percent range to protect against this disease, measles, which is the most contagious infectious disease, more contagious than any other infectious disease.”

 

And so it will find those people who are unvaccinated and cause an infection. I think this was a line that was crossed. This is the first measles death in a child in almost 20 years. That’s a tragedy because, one, any death in the child is a tragedy.

 

This was a preventable death. We basically eliminated measles from this country by the year 2000. It’s come back largely because people have chosen not to vaccinate their children, in part because they’re scared of the vaccine, scared that it has safety issues like autism, something that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been promoting loudly and to many people for the last 20 years. And I think this is the result of that.

 

As a result Mennonites are bringing death to their communities—particularly children—because they are listening to misinformation rather than scientists. As a result children are at risk or even dying from a preventable disease. That’s bad.

 

Q

Death of Truth, Right-wing Extremism, The Sleep of Reason, Trump

 

The next incident at the Pizza restaurant in the bizzarro world of right-wing radio and radical right-wing extremism was even crazier than all the others. This was the rise of Q who claimed that everything Alex Jones said was true, that Hillary Clinton was a murderer, that a Deep State runs America, and that a ring of pedophiles who worshipped Satan were kidnapping children and keeping them against their will in the basement of a pizza restaurant. Led by mythical and mysterious Q a new movement was formed to defend president Trump from perceived left-wing attacks by the Deep State. That movement was called QAnon, in honour of their leader—Q.

As Justin Ling said, “A whole new class of do-it-yourself broadcasters emerges online to introduce the masses to their new hero.”

 Jerome Corsi became a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy. He said QAnon was actually military intelligence. He said it came from Trump. He claimed to know the identity of Q. QAnon was a group in the Pentagon that was close to Donald Trump he said. Trump of course did not care what QAnon did, or how divisive they were, or destructive of society, so long as they treated him kindly. As always with Trump, no one mattered but Trump. He lived in a universe where only Trump matters.

Trump said, “I don’t know very much about the movement except I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate, but I don’t know very much about the movement.”

And that, of course, was good enough for Trump. No matter how wild the conspiracy theories were promulgated under the name of Trump, it did not matter to Trump, because Q supported Trump. That was all that mattered.

 

Nonsense on Steroids: Hillary Clinton Child Trafficker

American Fascism, Conspiracy Theories, Death of Truth, Hate, Right-wing Extremism, The Sleep of Reason, Trump

 

In the fall of 2016 Right-wing talk radio was consumed by a bizarre conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton and an evil cabal of liberal elites like Tom Hanks were supposedly involved in trafficking young children for sex while worshipping Satan in the basement of a Washington Pizzeria. It was nonsense on steroids but that did not stop conspiracy purveyors like Alex Jones from spreading these vicious lies in the service of his leader Donald Trump. And right-wing radio was abuzz with this rubbish.

Less than a week before the presidential election of 2016, Jones interviewed a private investigator and conspiracy theorist about this crazy conspiracy theory. Supposedly, also involved were disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the Clintons and a private aircraft called the Lolita Express.  This was the craft that took many young girls to Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean. The island was often referred to as the island acquired local nicknames such as “Island of Sin” and “Pedophile Island” not entirely without reason. The mere mention of this island or Epstein was enough to send American conservatives into rapturous hate.  This was a vast and constantly metastasizing conspiracy theory, fertilized by insinuations from Rush Limbaugh that the Clintons, while Bill was governor of Arkansas had Vince Foster, a party worker, murdered. There are many constantly evolving and growing versions of the nastiness that went on there.

Alex Jones calls these claims from the investigator “seismic, historical, wow.” Breitbart Radio devoted a whole segment to this conspiracy theory. Right-wing radio was energized like never before, and, of course, this also energized Trump’s supporters just before the election and there was nothing Hillary Clinton could do about it. Breitbart Radio alleged that Hillary Clinton went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. They said Bill Clinton went there at least 20 times, and Hillary Clinton at least 6 times.

As Justin Ling said on his CBC podcast The Flame Throwers,

“New elements are getting bolted on to this conspiracy theory. Suddenly Clinton is part of a Satanic Cult. Children are being sacrificed and they are begin kept in a secret location.”

 

It did not matter that the conspiracy theory was wildly false.  It sent nasty dust into the air to cover Hillary Clinton with outrageous allegations that were impossible to counter and ushered in nasty rumours that spread through Right-wing radio and the Internet like wildfire.

Yet this bogus claim, had serious real-life consequences. One rabid listener to all the crap on Jones’s show and right-wing radio, Edgar Welsch, from South Carolina, took it all seriously and after leaving his wife with a voice mail message that he was likely going to die, drove from his home with loaded guns to Washington D.C. to rescue the children from the basement of the pizza restaurant. He was unable to find a basement in the restaurant since there was none. He found no victims just young families enjoying pizza and playing games. Sadly, Welsch, was arrested and criminally charged with assault with a deadly weapon for his reckless actions that had been fueled by Alex Jones and his colleagues on right-wing radio. Jones actually pointed the gun at someone he saw in the restaurant, but fortunately, no one else was hurt as a result of the reckless actions of Jones and the other right-wing radio hosts.

We should also remember how Donald Trump shortly after being elected President in 2016 told Alex Jones how much Jones was respected.

All of this was part of the right-wing American assault on truth that has, by no means, diminished since 2016

Barbie

2024 Trip to South West United States, Death of Truth, The Sleep of Reason

 

In the film Barbie the wall between the “real world” and the “fantasy world” has been rubbed thin. Not only that, but in an absurd way, it as if the fantasy world is seen through a Fun House mirror. The “real world” is Los Angeles, which as we all know is the original fantasyland. In this film L.A.  is the gritty grim reality. The other direction is the “perfect” Barbie Land.  As we know the original Fantasy Land was invented in Los Angeles by Walt Disney.  And all you need to do to travel from one of those worlds to the other, is turn around your pink sports car and head in the opposite direction. Simple. Not?

In the world of fantasy everything from the real world is reversed. America, as we all know, has been in FantasyLand since its founding. One of those fantasies has been the fantasies of young girls. That of course, is the fantasy  that they are or can be Barbie.  The doll with the perfect life. The doll from Barbieland.

The film Barbie tackles that phenomenon with glitz, glamour, and stars from Hollywood—another land of fantasy of course. Reality’s doppelganger,  Barbieland is a matriarchal society filled with many versions of Barbie.  Each of the Barbies hold prestigious jobs such as scientists, political leaders, and professionals.  Obviously, absurd fantasies. The Kens, from Ken Land on the other hand spend their time playing at the beach. In fact, playing at the beach is their job. A nice job if you can get it. Yet Beach Ken (“Ken”) played by Ryan Gosling is only happy when he is with Barbie  or, as she is sometimes called, “Stereotypical Barbie” (Margot Robbie). In fact, Ken is not real unless she is looking at him. And he knows it.  But Barbie is constantly playing hard to get and frustrates Ken to no end. She makes life impossible for him. Though is life has always been impossible.

But one day reality intrudes and that changes everything. All of a sudden Barbie worries about death. How can that intrude into the perfect Barbie Land? At the same time, Barbie has bad breath, cellulite, and flat feet. Horrors. Why doesn’t reality stay where it belongs? On the outside! Barbie seeks out help from Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon)  a badly disfigured doll.  Far from the  perfection of Barbie. Weird Barbie tells Barbie she must find the real child who plays with her in the real world. Eventually, she does find that child Sasha (‘Ariana Greenblatt’), but it is her mother Gloria (America Ferrara), who really transforms the Barbies with a stirring speech about how impossible it is to be a woman in the real world. Here is part of what she says:

 

It is literally impossible to be a woman! You are so beautiful and so smart and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like we have to always be extraordinary and somehow we’re always doing it wrong. You’re supposed to be THIN but not TOO THIN and you can never say you want to be THIN you have to say you want to be HEALTHY but you also have to BE thin. You have to have money but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss but you can’t be mean. You’re supposed to lead but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to LOVE being a mother but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You’re supposed to be a career woman but always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is INSANE, but if you point that out then you’re accused of complaining. You’re supposed to be pretty for men but not SO pretty that you tempt them too much or threaten other women. You’re supposed to be part of the sisterhood but also stand out but also always be grateful. You have to never get old never be rude never show off never be selfish never fall down never fail never also always be grateful. You have to never get old never be rude never show off never be selfish never fall down never fail never show fear never get out of line It’s too hard, it’s too contradictory and no one says thank you or gives you a medal, and in fact, it turns out, somehow, that not only are you doing it all wrong but that everything is also YOUR fault. I’m just so damn tired of watching myself and every single other women tie ourselves in knots so that people will like us. And if all that is also true for a doll just representing a woman then I don’t even know!

 

How will all of this end?  Yet we have to live through the battle between the Kens and the Barbies and frankly it is not a fair fight. The Kens hardly have a chance. As Barbie says, “You play on their egos and their petty jealousies and you turn them against each other. While they’re fighting, we take back Barbie Land.” And it is amazing how shockingly easy it is to get the Kens to fight each other and make themselves easy pickings for the takeover by Barbies. that turns out.  They are just like real men in other words. The Kens look at each other suspiciously. No Ken can be trusted!

But there is another fight and that is the fight between everyone and the corporate intellectual pygmies at Mattel who own and control the Barbie franchise. This one is a fairer fight. Although the Mattel executives have power,  they lack brains. They are basically idiots. Take Mattel executive Aaron Dinks who asks a wonderful question: “Um, I’m a man with no power, does that make me a woman?”  Maybe he is not an idiot after all. The executives try to get Barbie who drove to Los Angeles to agree to get back into the box in which she had been marketed, but Barbie escapes. Amazingly, she prefers the imperfect to the perfection in Barbie Land. FantasyLand has its limitations she learns. So she bolts for freedom and we get the revolt of the dolls! And the executives chase her to get back in the box where they can sell her.

Can the Kens establish the patriarchy? Or will Barbie succeed in leading the Barbies in the pink revolution?  Barbie said, “I want to be part of the people that make meaning, not the thing that’s made. I want to be the one imagining, not the idea itself. Does that make sense?”  Her friend Ruth (Rhea Perlman) said, “I always knew that Barbie would surprise me.” She was right about that.  Whoever thought a movie about a doll would make sense?

 And I don’t want to give the results away. You have to watch the film to find out.

The scam at the heart of society

2024 Trip to South West United States, Death of Truth, Decline of the west, The Sleep of Reason

 

Scammers and rogues are everywhere.

Naomi Fry a commentator on the podcast Critics at Large, caught on to the essence of the lure of the scam when she asked,

“Isn’t this the promise of the American Dream where you are able to scale these new heights…It’s like to take a bite of American pie you have to spill some of the milk? To climb to the next level in this country, which we all want, you have to be a bit of a rogue. And the rogue and the scammer aren’t so far apart.”

This doesn’t apply only to George Santos. No one has demonstrated this more effectively than the former president Donald Trump. Of course, in his case perhaps we should drop the phrase “a bit of a” before the word “rogue.”

And we see ourselves in both scammers and suckers. And we see this characteristic in the scammers, because we see it in ourselves.

We saw a classic example of this in the film, The Postman Always Rings Twice, where the beautiful woman persuades her boyfriend to kill her husband so they can live happily ever after together. In films there was of course a Code which required that the film makers could not let the criminal “get away with it.”  So instead of giving people the thrill of seeing the scammer escape, it would give us the thrill of watching the rogue get caught and punished. That was also thrilling to us. We love to moralize and wag our fingers at miscreants.

Somehow, “we root for the protagonist” as Alexandra Schwarz says.  We cheer for them even as we know they won’t get away. We love living in FantasyLand, which is the point Kurt Anderson made in his book by that name.

Then in 2008 came an abrupt disruption of the model. That was the financial crisis, where according to Schwarz “we came to realize that the entire culture was built on a scam.” The poor got screwed while the rich, who caused the financial collapse in the first place were protected against their losses by payments made by the government. The poor paid the rich for their sins. How did that happen? It happened by a scam of course. Schwarz called it “the scam at the heart of society.”

As Schwarz also showed us, the scam shows us that  “the ground beneath our feet is not stable.” As many of us have learned, there is no security anymore! 

There is no security in FantasyLand. Except perhaps for the rich.

George Santos: The Fabulist

2024 Trip to South West United States, Death of Truth, reason, The Sleep of Reason, Trump

 

George Santos has become the subject of a tsunami of attention. People really are attracted to bullshitters. There is nothing wrong with that, unless they start to believe the bullshit.

Every one, it seems, wants a piece of George Santos now. Apparently, HBO wants to make an adaption of a new book about Santos perfectly named The Fabulist. In the book the point is made that we get the scammer we deserve. Like cheap politicians selling cheap beer.

According to Naomi Fry “the Trump era has opened the floodgates to politics as an out-and-out scam for those who wish to take advantage. I want to make it clear I do not think all politicians are scammers. That is not the case. I don’t want to be a part in shredding trust in politics. That is one of the things that is wrong with our current society. More and more people are losing that trust and that trust is vital for the survival of democracy.

America has had scammers in its history from day one. That is the point Kurt Anderson made in his book FantasyLand. Political scammers. Religious Scammers. Commercial scammers—you name it, they’re there.

The New Yorker podcast panel discussed a few famous American scammers in literature and real life. One of the panelists mentioned the Simpsons version of The Music Man, called “Marge vs. Zeller” (2020) where a travelling salesman Lyle Lanley and calls it a Shelbyville Idea. One of the townsfolk does not want to hear that. He says we are twice as smart as the people of Shelbyville. “Just tell us your idea and we’ll vote for it.” And what does he sell? He says Springfield needs a monorail. Even though Springfield doesn’t need a monorail. But Lanley seduces everyone. They beg for a monorail. That is what conmen do.

As Fry said, “The idea is that people will buy anything if you sell it to them in an attractive enough way. They want to believe. Whether it’s in religion or whether it’s in politics, or whether it’s in commerce, people just want to believe.”  That is exactly what the conmen do, and none has done it better than Donald Trump. He has sold his lie to millions and millions of people! That is what the 1980s televangelists did. As Fry said, “They said if you want your soul saved just send us money.” The key is usually the hyper desire of the scammed to believe the scam. When that is present anything is possible.

Call Time: As real as Chucky Cheese

2024 Trip to South West United States, Death of Truth, Decline of the west, The Simple Life, The Sleep of Reason

 

It is noteworthy that George Santos with his scummy videos on Cameo is actually doing exactly what Congressmen in the United States do. I have been told that American Congressmen spend half their working time phoning people for money. An aide hands them a quick note about the person they are calling and the politician talks to the person, be it a potential voter or potential donor, and tells them what they want to hear. For a couple of minutes, the politician is real chummy with the listener based on information on the cheat sheet. The listener thinks he has a real friend in Washington. But that friend is as real as Chucky Cheese. That is the deal: listen to the politician for a few minutes and perhaps consider a donation. Then the listener can go to his buddies and brag about how he got a call from the Congressman.

 

Vinson Cunningham, a New Yorker writer and member of the podcast panel  on Critics at Large, said the politicians he worked with referred to this as “Call time.” Politicians did it nearly every day. Cameo is exactly that. As Naomi Fry said about George Santos: “Politics has prepared him perfectly for this.” I would say, life in America or Canada has prepared him pretty good for this too. Living in FantasyLand is the perfect training for Call Time. Begging people you don’t know for money. Sort of like those people who stand on street meridians by traffic lights with their hands out usually with a sign briefly describing their plight.

That is exactly what American Congressmen do every day during Call Time.  It is no more dignified. It is no more real.

Mesmerized by Lies

2024 Trip to South West United States, civilization, Death of Truth, Decline of the west, The Sleep of Reason

 

One of the interesting things that one of the panelists on the Critics at Large podcast mentioned was that we as a people are “mesmerized by the lies”. To some extent “we identify with the scammer!” Part of us wants the scammer to win! Yet, at the same time, another side of us wants fervently to see the scammer wallow in his well-earned punishment.  We also want to point fingers and hiss at the miscreant. It is a bit like Saint Jerome who said that heaven would not be complete unless the saved could see the sinners roasting in hell. Is that what we  want to see?

According to Naomi Fry one of the 3 New Yorker writers on the panel, the latest version of the George Santos story is his entrance into Cameos. She described Cameos as “the platform where so-called celebrities from B-list to Z-list hock their wares.” The customers pay the “celebrity” for personalized videos. Santos is now one of the stars thanks to his fame as a spectacular liar. Just what is needed in FantasyLand. For this audience sensational lies are an attraction!

Some of the customers are rather surprising. There were some young female law students who paid the current rate for a completely phony pep talk from Santos who happily told the young women they were about to become “rock-star lawyers” and how they were going to “slay” the legal world. He was quite willing to do that even though he obviously did not know anything about them. “Queens who were about to conquer the world” he called them. Yet this is what the law students wanted. Why did they8 want to listen to obvious lies from a celebrity?

Santos very smoothly fits into this Fantasy world. In fact, he is really good at it. It cost $500 for a brief talk by Santos that bears absolutely no resemblance to reality whatsoever. For $500 bucks you can hire Santos to praise you, or your no-good son, or daughter. Even though Santos does not know any of you. Why would people pay for that?

As Naomi Fry said, “he is taking the pop culture detritus that surrounds you and is wearing it like so many Mardi-Gras Beads. Santos told the women law students they were approaching “the end at the light of the tunnel.” Santos is definitely smooth. He was born to be a scam artist, though, no doubt his short time in politics greased the path to his current fame and fortune. That is where he practiced his lies before turning professional.

Life in FantasyLand keeps getting stranger. to me it looks more and more like the end of western civilization.

Please-be-True Fantasies

2024 Trip to South West United States, Critical thinking, Death of Truth, Decline of the west, Skeptical Philosophy, The Sleep of Reason

 

Critics at Large, a podcast of the New Yorker discussed the subject of George Santos and his participation in what they called his scams, had a panel of columnists discuss his case. The columnists agreed we are living in the golden age of scam in which Santos is merely the latest iteration. This really is the point. Many people in North America live in a FantasyLand that is filled with astounding lies that are exploding through the ethnosphere. We are in the midst of surging lies and scams. They are ubiquitous.

 

Kurt Anderson in his gem of a book FantasyLand explains why this is so. He traces it back to the delusions of the original European visitors to North America.  This is what he said about early settlers in the United States, but would no doubt say about the same about the early European settlers to Canada. This world of illusions is by no means confined to the United States, but as I have said, that is where this world was profoundly amplified. This is how Anderson described it:

“The first English people in the New World imagined themselves as heroic can-do characters in exciting adventures. They were self-fictionalizing extremists who abandoned everything familiar because of their blazing beliefs, their long-shot hopes and dreams, their please-be-true fantasies.”

We are the ancestors of those fantasists. We are following in their footsteps 5 centuries later. And George Santos is merely the latest manifestation of that phenomenon.please-be-true fantasies.”

This is what  what happens when we abandon critical thinking and skepticism in favor of fantasies that we want to be true so ignore the lack of evidence for them .