Schoolhouse Rock, 2023 Reboot

If you watched Saturday morning television in the United States between 1973 and 1984, you probably remember the educational film shorts that aired between the cartoons, known as "Schoolhouse Rock." Those animated segments featuring cheeky commentary set to catchy music, focused on specific themes in the areas of mathematics, science, social studies and grammar. I was a little old for them but one segment that immediately comes to mind was called Conjunction Junction which you can watch here. Another was about how laws are made in Congress called I'm Just a Bill.

It's probably safe to say an entire generation of Americans remember the concepts they learned on Schoolhouse Rock better than the ones they learned at school.

Today, while we're falling behind the rest of the world when it comes to our knowledge of math, science and language skills, Americans are getting a full-blown education in social studies, at least in terms of American law and government, thanks the hottest show around, featuring the escapades of one former president and his multiple run-ins with the law. 

Of course, like Saturday morning cartoons, the wall-to-wall media coverage of the travails of the exPOTUS is not to everyone's taste. To others such as myself, it's like a train wreck we can't turn our eyes from.  

Lucky for us because it provides a valuable lesson reminding us of many things we forgot from school about the Constitution, American politics and jurisprudence.

A lot of Americans myself included, may only have spotty knowledge about our Constitution, but we sure think we know a lot about its First Amendment, especially the part guaranteeing our freedom of speech. 

We all understand, or so I hope, that freedom of speech/expression is one of the linchpins of any democracy.

But we're learning, thanks in part to this version of Schoolhouse Rock, that like all freedoms, freedom of speech does not come without responsibilities. One cannot express a controversial opinion for example and expect it to be immune from consequences such as harsh judgement, public humiliation or even (in some cases) the loss of a job, just to name a few.

Nor is it absolute. The First Amendment itself does not enumerate limits to speech. That has been the role of the Supreme Court and over two centuries of precedent. 

Here are just some of the categories of speech that the Court has deemed not protected by the First Amendment. Engaging in them can land you into serious trouble with the law:

• Speech that violates intellectual property rights: You can't use someone else's speech or ideas and claim them as your own. 
• True threats: Statements that can reasonably be construed as an intent to inflict harm on the recipient. 
• Fighting Words: Statements that can reasonably be construed as intending to provoke a violent response.
• Child pornography: No explanation necessary.
  
• Incitement: Speech designed to provoke the commission of a crime.
• Defamation and Libel: False statements designed to injure a person's reputation.

As you might imagine, there is a great deal of latitude here, making the judgement of whether speech rightly falls under any of these categories challenging, and quite difficult to prove in a court of law. That's why lawyers get paid the big bucks.

Years ago, working in a photography department in an art museum, our chief curator was sought out by lawyers representing a couple who was under suspicion of producing child pornography. They had taken nude photographs of their young children and were turned in to the DCFS by the lab that processed their film. The curator was asked if the photos had any "artistic merit" or if he thought they were exploitive and pornographic. He referenced works in our collection of a similar nature by established artists such as Sally Mann, but in the end, took the route of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who had this to say about pornography: "I know it when I see it." Then as Justice Stewart did when writing for the majority in a 1964 obscenity case, our curator added (in not so many words): "and this ain't it."   

Unfortunately, many of the limits to free speech can best be judged by the standard, "I know it when I see it", meaning there are few objective criteria to determine if certain forms of expression fall into the realm of non-protected speech. 

Not surprising then, there is a rigorous burden of proof required to convict someone of crossing the line into unprotected speech meaning that courts when in doubt, generally err on the side of the literal interpretation of the First Amendment.

Take the most conspicuous example of all the actions that got the exPOTUS into hot water with the latest federal indictment which happened before our very eyes, the attack on our Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. That morning from the Ellipse, just south of the White House, the soon-to-be ex-president gave a speech instructing his supporters numbering in the thousands, to march up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to protest the certification of the new president, scheduled for later that afternoon. 

In the speech he said this:

All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they're doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That's what they've done and what they're doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved.

One of the pieces of evidence of a "stolen election" he cited is that in the presidential election held in 2016, he received 66 million votes while in 2020 he received 75 million, more votes than any candidate for president had ever received before. 

Unfortunately for him, his opponent in 2020 received 80+ million votes in the general election, and where it really counted, his opponent won the Electoral College by the same amount of votes the out-going president won against Hillary Clinton in 2016. If you remember, the exPOTUS declared that victory "a landslide", even though he lost the popular vote by three million votes. 

But the exPOTUS begged to differ, He added:

And by the way, does anybody believe that Joe had 80 million votes? Does anybody believe that? He had 80 million computer votes. It's a disgrace... Take third-world countries. Their elections are more honest than what we've been going through in this country. It's a disgrace. It's a disgrace...

We will not let them silence your voices. We're not going to let it happen, I'm not going to let it happen.

He then went on to thank Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, otherwise known as co-Conspirator One and co-Conspirator Two in his second federal indictment, for their stalwart efforts attempting to keep his presidency alive past its expiration date. It was Eastman who came up with the idea that Vice President Pence could reject the tally of electoral votes up on Capitol Hill that day (he really couldn't) and send the results back to the states where they would hopefully return a more favorable result for the president. He went on:

And he (Eastman) looked at Mike Pence, and I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so.

Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.... He has the absolute right to do it. We're supposed to protect our country, support our country, support our Constitution, and protect our constitution...

And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn't, that will be a, a sad day for our country because you're sworn to uphold our Constitution.

After rambling on for about an hour about how unfair losing the election was, he closed by saying this:

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.

As we all know, Mike Pence didn't do "the right thing" by the exPOTUS that day, and the mob at the Capitol quickly got wind of it. Soon, shouts of "hang Mike Pence" were heard by throngs of Trump supporters, some of whom had the foresight to bring makeshift gallows, should the need for one arise. The mob would eventually breach security and break into and attack the most potent symbol of our democracy. To make matters worse, the soon-to-be ex-president did nothing to stop the attack. Instead, he threw gasoline on the fire by tweeting the following, AFTER he learned that the mob was calling for Mike Pence's head:

Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done.

Fortunately, the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the members of Congress who were in the crosshairs of the mob, all escaped the ordeal unharmed, largely thanks to the quick thinking and heroism of the Capitol Police. 

Unfortunately, five lives were lost that day including members of the Capitol Police. About 150 officers including metropolitan police and those from other agencies were injured. At least four officers took their lives in the months following the attack. 

Whether you call it an insurrection, an act of domestic terrorism, a riot, or merely a spirited protest that got out of hand, it's impossible to make the case that serious crimes were not committed that day by supporters of the president. And one would have to be delusional not to place at least some of the responsibility for the violence and loss of life on the words and actions of one Donald J. Trump on January 6, 2021, and the weeks leading up to it.

So, it would seem reasonable by the definition of the term mentioned above, that the exPOTUS should be charged with incitement, as without his election lies, his calls to interfere with the process of confirming his successor, and especially his very public pressure on and ultimate denouncement of the Vice President, none of this would have happened. That fact was confirmed by many of the rioters who were convicted of and are now doing time for their crimes that day, who insisted they were there to do the ex-president's bidding.

And if you believe as I do that the attack on the Capitol was indeed an insurrection (defined as violence against lawful civil authority with the intent to cause its overthrow) AND believe that Trump incited it, then he could be charged with an even more serious crime, sedition, which is defined as "the crime of creating a revolt, disturbance, or violence against lawful civil authority with the intent to cause its overthrow." 

In other words, inciting an insurrection.

To my eyes, I know an insurrection when I see one, and that's exactly what this was.

And I know incitement when I see it and sure enough, this has all the hallmarks of it.

The problem is, you may not see it that way. You might reasonably point out that in his speech, the president did not tell the crowd to break into the Capitol. You might also reasonably point out that at one point in his speech he told his supporters to demonstrate peacefully, or that he was not present at the Capitol at the time of the attack, (even though it appears that he intended to be). More importantly, any one of the twelve jurors picked to decide his fate may legitimately see it that way too, which would result in a hung jury if they cannot be persuaded otherwise by the other 11jurors. 

In the weeks since Special Prosecutor Jack Smith released his latest indictment, the exPOTUS and his supporters have gone all out to use the First Amendment as their primary defense, saying he is being accused of very serious crimes when all he was doing was exercising his freedom of speech.

Do they have a point?

No they don't, because the exPOTUS is not being charged either with sedition or inciting the attack on the Capitol.

Federal prosecutors don't enjoy having a high conviction rate because they choose to prosecute cases that stand a good chance of losing.

Even though he could have charged the exPOTUS with incitement of the mob that attacked the Capitol, Jack Smith, one of the best in the business, steps ahead of the ex-president and his defenders, took a pass on that one.

Instead, in the introduction to his indictment, Smith points out that the president like every American is guaranteed by the First Amendment, freedom of speech, including speaking in public about the election, and even to make false claims about it. The document goes on to point out the numerous recourses available to candidates to contest a disputed election including recounts, audits and legal challenges, all of which the exPOTUS took full advantage of. Once all legal means proved unsuccessful, the indictment alleges the exPOTUS and his co-conspirators, attempted other measures to challenge the election, outside of the law.

In the 45-page August 1st indictment which you can find here, the ex-president was charged with four counts of conspiracy to overturn the legitimate results of an American election, and the obstruction official government proceedings, all in violation of statutes listed in the main criminal code of the federal government of United States, Title 18.

The four counts and the statutes they violate are as follows:

1. Conspiracy to Defraud the United States (18 U.S.Code §371)
2. Conspiracy to Obstruct an Official Proceeding. (18 U.S.Code §1512(k))
3. Obstruction of and Attempt to Obstruct an Official Proceeding. (18 U.S.Code §§1512(c)(2),2)
4. Conspiracy Against Rights (18 U.S.Code §241)

In the legal sense, conspiracy is defined as two or more people planning a crime, then taking steps to implement that plan. The crime itself does not have to be committed.

Count one is referring to the electoral process as established by the Constitution. The defendant and his co-conspirators are accused of conspiring to overturn that function through "dishonesty, fraud and deceit" by falsely insisting the election was "stolen".

Remember, merely talking about committing a crime does not make a conspiracy.

The means by which they carried out their fraudulent enterprise to subvert the electoral process include:

• Pressuring government officials in states where the defendant lost by a relatively small amount, to replace the electors who would cast their votes for the legitimate winner of that state, Joe Biden, to electors who would cast their votes for the defendant. 
• Pressuring state government officials through the supposed authority of the Justice Department (who was not in on the plan), to conduct sham investigations into their elections. 
• Attempting to enlist the aid of the Vice President to "fraudulently alter the election results."

Counts Two and Three refer to the obstruction of the January 6, 2021 joint session of Congress to confirm the election of the next president, both the conspiracy and the actual act.  

The indictment concludes with Count Four. Here are the allegations in their entirety:

From on or about November 14, 2020 through on or about January 7, 2021, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere the Defendant,

DONALD J. TRUMP

did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States -that is, the right to vote, and to have one's vote counted.

(In violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 241).

Despite being a well put-together indictment, it is still far from an iron-clad, slam-dunk case against the exPOTUS. 

As we've all read and heard ad nauseam over the last few months, the exPOTUS is the only president ever to have been indicted. Clearly, we are in uncharted waters here. Add to that the former president is currently a candidate for president who if nominated by his party, will be running against the current president whose Justice Department will be prosecuting him.

I pointed out in this post why I believe the accusations of the current president "weaponizing" his Justice Department against a political opponent are meritless. But the prosecution will have to convince that to all twelve jurors at the trial.

Fraud may be a difficult issue to prove. If deep-down in the recesses of his mind the defendant truly believed that the outcome of the election was "rigged" against him, could he really have been committing fraud which is defined as "wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain"?

In other words, if he truly believed the election was stolen from him, he wasn't practicing criminal deception, as state of mind is a key factor in determining guilt or innocence. 

Nevertheless, rigged or not, he still participated in illegal means to overturn an election, that much is certain. In the indictment there is a plethora of evidence to support the idea that the exPOTUS knew he lost the election fair and square, but on this too the prosecution will have to convince all twelve jurors. 

Then there is the idea of "Conspiracy Against Rights." 

Here is the opening of Section 241 of title 18 of the United States Code which according to the prosecution, justifies the charge of Conspiracy Against Rights:

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same... they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

This statute was written after the Civil War and its chief purpose was to prevent the intimidation of black people attempting to vote. It was used extensively during the modern Civil Rights movement of the twentieth century for the same purpose. 

Once again it will be up to the prosecution to prove to all twelve members of the jury, that the statute applies to this particular case.

Regardless of one's feelings about the exPOTUS, our system of justice demands that he is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Like everyone, he is entitled to his day in court and to a competent defense. 

Also like everyone, if found guilty, he should be held accountable for his actions, regardless of his past job and his aspirations for future employment. 

In this particular case, there is very little in doubt about his actions and those of his co-conspirators. What is in doubt and what the outcome of a potential trial will determine, is the legality of those actions. 

I'm obviously not a lawyer so my opinions on legal matters are of little worth. But as the facts of this case are not much in question, I can say with a great deal of certainly that those actions, illegal or not, were wrong. Very wrong. They run counter to the very idea and spirit of a Democratic-Republic, the system of government we have kept alive in this nation for nearly a quarter of a millennium, the system of government every president is responsible for upholding.

I used to think the term "existential threat to democracy" when applied to this exPOTUS was hyperbolic, but I no longer do.

It's interesting to hear people who clearly support his bid for another term as president tear apart the indictment, which I suspect many of them have not read, saying that what the exPOTUS did may have been wrong, but the prosecution cannot prove that the actions were illegal. 

That perplexes me because if they admit what he did was wrong, why would they still support him?

For instance:

OK it was wrong for him to watch on TV as his supporters broke into the Capitol, cheering them on as they used flag poles as weapons against the Capitol Police and others, causing grievous injury to many, threatening the lives of his Vice President and other elected officials, and doing absolutely NOTHING to stop it. 

But it may not have been illegal so...

It was wrong to place the burden on his Vice President to do something completely out of his authority, then set him up as the fall guy, placing him in great peril simply for doing the job the Constitution required of him.

But it may not have been illegal so...

It was wrong to single out by name, dedicated, private citizen poll workers doing their job in Georgia, seriously compromising their safety and wellbeing by falsely claiming they were changing votes for him into votes for his opponent. 

But it may not have been illegal so...

It was wrong that co-Conspirator Four in the August 1 indictment, a mid-level Justice Department official and the president's pick to become acting AG in the waning days of his presidency, suggested invoking the Insurgency Act to have the military put down protestors when informed by others in the president's inner circle that there would be an uprising if the president overturned the election.

But it may not have been illegal so...

It was wrong to threaten state government officials with legal action if they didn't overturn the results of a legitimate election or "find" just enough votes in their state to put him over the top. 

But it may not have been illegal so...

It was wrong for him to not accept the results of an election proscribed by the Constitution after exhausting all his legal recourses to make sure it was fair, then throw this country into turmoil, threatening a constitutional crisis simply to remain in office, mocking our century's old tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.

But it may not have been illegal so...

And on and on and on.

Then there's this:

The indictment shows the ex-president received the advice of dozens of legal experts on his team including his own Attorney General, all telling him there was no evidence of election fraud significant enough to have changed the results of the 2020 election. It also mentions over sixty failed lawsuits, several audits and recounts, all refuting his claims of a stolen election. If after all that the exPOTUS continued to believe as his supporters claim he did, that he should have won the election, then he is a delusional fool with a pathologically flawed sense of judgement, as opposed to a mere fraud. 

Take your pick. Could the bar possibly be set any lower than that?

Maybe it's just me but I wouldn't want either a fool or a fraud as president. 

What Jack Smith's reboot of Schoolhouse Rock teaches us is that comprehensive as our laws may be, the framers of our Constitution and the legislators who have written our subsequent laws, didn't think of everything. For example, much to nearly everyone's surprise, there is no statute preventing a convicted felon from running for and serving as president, even from behind bars, something we may be confronting in a short time. 

In order to ensure that wrongdoers face justice, sometimes lawyers representing the State and the Federal Government need to be creative, as the Special Prosecutor, as well as the District Attorney of the State of Georgia Fani Willis* have been with their indictments.

That may or may not work in their favor as far as getting convictions but one thing is for certain. The most valuable lesson in this whole mess is this:

Just because something is not illegal does not mean it is not wrong.

Our country is at a crossroads and we need to think quite seriously about what kind of nation we want to be. Do we want a nation led by public servants who are democratically elected, controlled by the rule of law and a system of checks and balances, the most salient of which are term limits and a quadrennial re-election process? 

Or do we want to be led by an authoritarian ruler-for-life who does as he pleases and answers to no one or nothing other than his own whims? 

That seems like a simple choice. Unfortunately, I'm afraid the "Founding Fathers" overestimated us. It apparently never occurred to them in their wildest dreams that a significant number of Americans would go for choice number two.

 

*CODA This article was begun before the State of Georgia released their own indictment of the exPOTUS on August 14, which is why I focused on the August 1 Federal indictment rather than on both. Interesting that the two prosecutors, Jack Smith for the Federal government and Fani Willis for the State of Georgia, took much different approaches to their indictments. One could say the former used a scalpel and the latter a chain saw. It will be interesting to see how it all these 91 criminal counts pan out.  

A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

Almost two years ago I wrote this post about a group of people who reject logic, common sense, and three millennia worth of collective human knowledge.  I'm talking about the people who believe the earth is flat. 

It's hard to say how many people actually believe this, harder still to determine if they are serious or are just pulling our leg. But an article from Forbes suggests only two thirds of American millennials believe without question that the Earth is a sphere. 

Here I'm reproducing a chart from the article which breaks down a 2018 YouGov poll into age groups and the degree to what people believe, or don't: 

There are lots of things to get out of this, the most striking for me is that the older the you are, the more likely you are to believe the earth is a sphere.  

One explanation is that the oldest demographic on the chart, those of us 55 and older, lived through the era of the race to the moon. Many of us were watching TV on Christmas Eve, 1968 as the crew of Apollo 8 became the first people to circle that desolate planet (as it was classified by the ancient Greeks). As they came around the far side of the moon for the first time, they caught their first glimpse of earthrise. In doing so, those astronauts became the first human beings to view our beautiful planet in all its spherical splendor from outer space. And living vicariously through the eyes of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders, we earthlings sitting at home upon terra firma, also bore witness to that unforgettable sight, looking at ourselves from some 300,000 miles away.  

Through all of the turmoil of the sixties those space launches captivated the imagination of a generation, well a good number of us anyway, as each mission had truly gone to places "where no man had gone before." 

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that only six percent of us who lived through that time have any question about the shape of our planet, after all, six percent probably equals the number of our fellow Americans who either figuratively or literally live under rocks. 

My guess is that subsequent generations who were not inundated by a daily dose of space news as we were fifty plus years ago, focused on other things, and a lot of them simply didn't spend time thinking about the true nature of our planet and its celestial neighbors.

Nonetheless if this poll is to be believed, 34 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 not being absolutely certain about a fact that educated human beings across cultures have accepted and understood for nearly three thousand years is a staggering number, one that depresses me to no end. 

Of course, believing the earth is flat does not make it so. I suppose the earth really doesn't need to be round for most folks unless their work depends on it, such as airline pilots looking for the shortest distance to get from Point A to Point B. That's why you fly close to the north pole when you travel from say, Chicago to Dehli as my wife did a few years ago, rather then over Africa as a standard Mercator projection map would suggest.*

And believing that space travel is a hoax as many flat-earthers do, isn't going to make things such as the internet, GPS, trans-oceanic TV broadcasts, or ATMs go away, even though those things we've all come to depend upon and take for granted, would be non-existent without satellites orbiting around a spherical earth, 

So I guess one could say that people being ignorant about something as esoteric as the shape of our planet really isn't that big of a deal.

Or is it?

The troubling part of all this is the means by which these global agnostics have come to their opinions. It's not just them, there has been a disturbing trend of late to jettison critical judgement in favor of motivated reasoning to come to all sorts of conclusions that have no basis in reality. As we'll see, this can have terrible ramifications for our civilization.

For starters, I believe wholeheartedly that a skeptical mind is a healthy mind. I come from a generation whose mantra was "Question Authority" and for a while in my teens I even sported a button that said just that, By authority I don't just mean the powers that be like parents, teachers, school principals, bosses and politicians, but also folks in fields of endeavor that normally command high levels of respect such as doctors, scientists, historians, journalists, and so on.

Learned and dedicated as they may be, all of these are human beings capable of error, and merely having their imprimatur upon something, regardless of their standing in their particular field, needn't or shouldn't be taken as gospel truth. Any good scientist will tell you that science doesn't have the definitive answer for anything, rather it settles on the best answer until a better one comes along. 

As I pointed out in my earlier piece, the idea of questioning scientific facts, even ones that have been understood for quite some time isn't by itself a bad thing. Asking ourselves something like, "how do we actually know the true shape of the earth?" and then honestly addressing that question is quite useful as it forces us to ahem... think.

Which is exactly what I attempted to do in my piece, going step by deliberate step through some of the process of how we came to know, and yes I mean to know beyond any doubt, even without the benefit of the testimony and photographs of people who witnessed it first hand, that not only is the earth a sphere, but that it is a planet just like Venus, Mars, Jupiter and the rest, revolving about the sun, which is historically an even more controversial subject. 

Not surprisingly. the flat earthers have rebuttals, proposing alternate explanations that contradict a plethora of logical conclusions made over the millennia.

As for what should be the slam dunk empirical evidence of the true shape of the planet, the eyewitness accounts and photographs of our planet made from space, flat earthers have no real explanation. Instead they pull out what has become the all too prevalent method these days to explain the unexplainable, the conspiracy theory. The eyewitness accounts and photographs they say are all fake because the space programs that several nations have participated in, both independently and collaboratively for well over sixty years, are all hoaxes. 

Now I don't flat out reject all conspiracy theories. For example, while I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of JFK, I don't completely rule out the idea that someone may have helped him carry it out. However I don't believe there was any deep seeded conspiracy involving organizations such as the KGB, CIA, FBI or the PTA, all of whom (well almost) have been accused at some point or other as having conspired to kill the president. 

Why don't I believe that? Certainly not because something like that couldn't happen, but because nearly 58 years after the event, not a single credible person involved in any conspiracy has come forward to come clean. The likelihood of all that time passing after one of the most publicized crimes of the last century without someone, anyone of the multitude of people who would have had to have been involved in the kind of conspiracy people suggest coming forward, is evidence enough for me that there was no conspiracy, beyond perhaps a very small handful of individuals.

By the same token, at least tens of thousands of people of many different nations directly involved in the various space programs over the years would have had to have been in on the space hoax. The fact that not a single one of them has stepped forward to fess up since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, should make the whole idea of this particular conspiracy a non-starter to any reasonable person.   

So why do people cling to conspiracy theories when they're improbable like the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory, or preposterous like the space hoax theory?

I have a simple answer, because they want to believe them. In the case of the former, people find it existentially unacceptable that the course of human history could be so drastically altered by the act of one person, a solitary gunman. I get that.

Perhaps similarly, the image of our world becoming smaller and more insignificant as scientists discover the universe as being more expansive by the minute, is equally unacceptable to some. I get that too. It's difficult and sometimes painful to have your world view shattered before your eyes.

All of us at some point have had our world view shredded to pieces. Some of us get over it and move on while others, not so much. 

The latter are the people for whom facts tend to be what they want them to be, not necessarily what they are. 

As I said above, believing the earth is flat does not make it so. The laws of nature, that is to say physics, chemistry, biology and the other natural sciences, could not care less what we think or what we do. So there's no real harm in lay people believing the earth is any shape they want it to be. 

On the other hand, there are serious consequences if we go on believing for example that our actions regarding the environment will not have drastic implications for life on this planet. Nature does not care one iota about what we think, it doesn't care about about protecting life, it's not sentimental, it has no morals, ethics or value system. Nature simply reacts.

We have empirical evidence of this, real life models such as our closest planetary neighbor Venus, on the effects on the environment of greenhouse gasses which are increasing on this planet at an alarming rate. That planet is shrouded by an atmosphere consisting of about 95 percent Carbon Dioxide which permits the heat from the sun to penetrate it, but not escape. Consequently the surface temperature of Venus is around 900 degrees F. The atmospheric pressure at the surface of Venus is about ninety times that of the earth's at sea level. We know this because the several space probes Soviet scientists sent to Venus over forty years ago, sent back valuable information about the planet for a few minutes until they were crushed by the Venusian atmospheric pressure and melted by the intense heat. Some scientists believe Venus was not always this way, that perhaps at one time eons ago, Venus had an environment much like that of the earth's, including oceans of water.

We may never know exactly what happened to make Venus such an inhospitable place, but we do know conclusively that its extreme temperature is a direct result of the overabundance of CO2 in its atmosphere. On earth, nature has provided a balance that keeps our CO2 levels in check. If you recall your high school biology, animals consume oxygen and release CO2 into the atmosphere while plants do exactly the opposite. In the last centuries, one of the byproducts of human industry has been the production of copious amounts of CO2, while global deforestation on a massive scale has removed much of the planet's capacity to keep CO2 in check. It doesn't take a brilliant mind to put two and two together to understand that if left unchecked, this is a recipe for disaster. Given the extreme weather events we've been experiencing of late, we are at this moment are more than likely reaping what we have sown, but as yet, only on a small scale.

These are not opinions, but verifiable facts we have known about for a long time. I first learned about the threat of greenhouse gasses on our environment way back in high school in the mid-seventies.

Yet climate change deniers abound, contradicting the conclusions of the vast majority of the world's scientists, simply because they want to.  

Since I wrote my original piece on the flat earthers, two events have taken place that dramatically illustrate the very real dangers of rejecting critical thinking in favor of motivated reasoning and its first cousin, willful ignorance. The first was the COVID pandemic. Despite dire warnings of the devastating effects of the virus in Asia and Europe in the first months of 2020, the US under the so called leadership of its former president, did nothing to prepare the American people for what was coming. That president even referred publicly to the virus as a hoax, long after knowing not only that COVID was very real, but that it could be spread by airborne particles, making it far more contagious and deadly than originally thought. Then after the spread of the virus was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization and people started to get sick and die in this country, that president and his minions continued to downplay it, fighting tooth and nail against common sense life saving measures such as social distancing and wearing masks, claiming those to be violations of personal freedom. Consequently, the United States had one of the worst COVID responses anywhere, including the highest number of fatalities of any country in the world, a dubious distinction which continues to this day. 

The irony is that the one thing regarding the pandemic the former president did do while he was still in office, was tout the eventual rolling out of a vaccine. Once the vaccine came out, the by then former president got himself at the head of the line to receive a shot, but did so in private, (unlike other former presidents), presumably so as not to draw attention to his successor's efforts to get as many people vaccinated as possible. Up until recently, that former president had not lifted one finger to try to convince his supporters, many of whom still believe his original claims that the virus is a hoax, to get the shot, leading to even more unnecessary suffering and death. When he finally came out at a rally in Alabama last week and sheepishly suggested the crowd get vaccinated, they booed him, so he backpedaled.

The other devastating event inspired by willful ignorance that caused people to lose their lives and threatened to tear apart our democracy to boot, was inspired by the former president's erroneous claims about the last election. It's likely that the majority of the people who broke into the Capitol Building last January 6th, really believed that the November 3, 2020 election was "stolen" from the man who goaded them on before their deadly rampage on our nation's most sacred monument to democracy. So their presence and their violent actions to prevent Congress from certifying the results of a free and fair election were an attempt in their eyes to protect the integrity of the electoral process. Their supporters consider them heroes. 

The problem is their beliefs were based upon a lie, nothing more than the baseless claims of the defeated president and only a small handful of his minions (as the majority of his minions abandoned him on this issue).. There is not one shred of evidence that votes cast fraudulently had any effect on the outcome of the last election. Then why did the insurrectionists believe the president and not the hundreds of boards of elections across the country, many of them overseen by Republicans who made it abundantly clear that this was one of the cleanest presidential elections in history, not the courts, many of them overseen by judges appointed by the exPOTUS who determined there was no legitimacy to the former presidents claims, or even his ever faithful Attorney General who knowing a lost cause when he saw one, decided to preserve the last milliliter of integrity he had left? 

They believed the president because they wanted to. 

Just the other day, months after the election, I read an interesting question on the web: It was this:

 Where is the evidence that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election?

To me that is very much like the question "where is the evidence that the earth is round" in that it questions something we have taken for granted for a very long time. I can't remember a time in my life which has seen a good number of elections, where someone would have sincerely asked that question nine months after an election. Still like the flat earth question, I believe it's one worth addressing, if only to set the record straight.

Since 1789 when George Washington was first elected president, Americans by and large have put trust in an election system where citizens cast their votes in a secret ballot, other people count those ballots, tally them, then declare a winner based upon the candidate who received the most votes. Still other people check the work of the vote counters. It's not a perfect system to be sure, such as system does not, nor will never exist. 

After the declaration of a winner, the loser has the opportunity to ask for a recount. If the result is close enough, the candidate does not even have to pay for the recount. Beyond that there are other resources available to the loser of an election, most of them involving the courts. 

But very rarely does it come to that, candidates traditionally have excepted the fact that there can only be one winner of an election. Losers are expected to be gracious, if not magnanimous in defeat, which they usually concede when it looks like they no longer have a chance of winning, more often than not, the evening of the election. Moving forward they encourage their disappointed supporters to get behind the winner for the good of the nation.

The 2020 presidential election was not a close one, Joe Biden won the popular vote by ten million votes. In the real arbiter of presidential elections, the Electoral College, Biden won that by exactly the same margin that Donald Trump won in the previous election. If you recall, Trump claimed his electoral victory in that election to be a massive landslide.

Despite losing handily in 2020, the exPOTUS has refused to this day to concede defeat, going to extraordinary lengths to hold onto power, long after all the legal measures available to him ran out. That includes several investigations, recounts, and lawsuits, all of which failed to turn up any evidence of the kind of irregularities that would have made any difference in the election. 

The bottom line is this, as we can't have every single voter publicly declare his or her vote live on TV to be viewed and counted by all, we need to put some trust into the election system and the people who manage it. Otherwise no one will accept the outcome of any election, and our Democratic Republic system of government will grind to a halt. What will replace it is too ominous to think of. 

People acting in bad faith, and among those I include the exPOTUS, know full well that casting serious doubt in an election system gives them the opening to cause all kinds of mischief as they have already done and will continue to do if they are not stopped.

Even before the ex president, mistrust of authority of all kinds was at an all time high. Thanks to his herculean efforts to do cast doubt among his supporters, it has risen astronomically since then.

The good news is that because of technology, never in history has access to information been more readily available for just about anybody to form reasonable, sound and rational opinions. 

The bad news is that never before has there been more access to dubious information that can be used to justify and promote any cockamamie belief known to man.

It's that last part that has emboldened many thousands individuals who have viewed a YouTube video or two about a particular subject, to claim their opinion on the subject is on a par with that of someone who has spent a lifetime studying that subject. then boldly going to places no one has gone before, proudly declaring their willful ignorance to anyone willing to listen.

And it turns out there are plenty of listeners. That doesn't bode well for our democracy, our planet, or maybe even our species.

As I said above, it's useful to question everything, even theories put forward by learned experts in any field of endeavor. But that is where critical judgement, the mortal enemy of motivated reasoning comes in.

They say the true sign of intelligence is not how much we know, but appreciating how much we don't know. Just as it's important to question everything, it's also critically important to give people who know more than us, their due.

As anyone who has ever tried to speak to someone in a foreign language they hardly know finds out, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

At some point, we all have to put at least a modicum of trust in the "experts", because questioning authority is not the same thing as rejecting authority. 

Otherwise if we don't, we're all in a heap of trouble.

* Ah but wait! Here's one version of the flat earth proposed by its advocates which places the North Pole at the center of a disc from which the lines of longitude radiate. On this map the shortest distance between Chicago and Dehli indeed takes one over the North Pole. But my question is this, what if you wanted to fly from Rio to Sydney? On this map, the shortest distance between those two cities in the Southern Hemisphere also takes you above the North Pole!