RationalWiki:What is going on in the blogosphere?/May 2017

May 2017
Is the US government hiding evidence of alien visitors at Roswell or Area 51? We now can be sure they aren't. A video exposing the corruption in Putin's government has been banned in Russia, so its makers have reuploaded it to PornHub. In public understanding of science, "alternative facts" are the norm. [http://www.rawstory.com/2017/05/white-genocide-in-space-racist-fans-seethe-at-diversity-in-new-star-trek-series/ Star Trek Discovery &mdash; y'know, the series that shows races from all over the galaxy working together &mdash; now has an Asian captain and a black first officer. Right wingers are outraged by this clear example of "white genocide".] A new experiment in teaching kids to be critical thinkers and combat pseudoscience and fake news shows promise. Hoaxers, with an axe to grind on gender studies, pay to get paper published in predatory open-access journal too new to have an impact factor, Cogent Social Sciences, arguing that penises cause global warming. Apparently vanity published papers prove postmodernism is false. PZ Myers dissects this silly stunt. Was the Tea Party born in this dominatrix's Indiana fetish dungeon? Robert E. Lee was not that good a General, says The Washington Post. Sovereign citizens [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/15/sovereign-citizens-rightwing-terrorism-hate-us-government? &mdash; not "radical Islam" &mdash; are the biggest terrorist threat in the US.] Fox News scandal widens. Astroturfing, stalking, and smears, oh my! String theory still hasn't solved its previous problems, and it's accumulating new ones now too. The Week on liberals' free speech amnesia. The American Conservative On comparing Jacksonian-style conservative populism with Bernie Sanders liberal populism—[http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/andy-jacksons-populism/ Until Jackson, no American politician captured the evils of crony capitalism as sharply and powerfully as this combative frontier figure with his hair-trigger temper and pugilistic style.... His program—low taxes, small government, a level playing field for all Americans, strict construction of the Constitution—became the program favored by most Americans.] Stephen Colbert "interviews" President Donald Trump (YouTube link).