Sounds like the North Vietnamese/Soviets and other totalitarian regimes with those swarms of "political advisors" infecting everything. Canada had a guy by the name of Harper who tried to politicize everything. Wonder what he's doing now... other than collecting his debts.

And Harper didn't come close to the crew in the US.

Right now Ontario has Doug Ford who is just starting on this route. First step was revert to the old curriculum for sex ed and the next step seems to be to remove gender from the curriculum.

Would love to make him gender-neutral.

It's not just science that's under attack

Texas Will Keep Teaching Kids That Moses Influenced the Founding of America
BY DAVID GEE

The Texas Board of Education has decided to keep the biblical character of Moses in the part of the social studies curriculum that discusses historical figures important to the founding of the United States.

etc ....

https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/201 ... f-america/

Just an observation - Moses never existed.

#104

Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahaha

Just an observation - Moses never existed


Well now just hold your horses! Just because there's an unbroken record of Pharaohs, from birth to death, spanning the supposed era Moses existed and none of them disappeared into the Red Sea, doesn't mean Moses didn't exist. Heck no! The way some Jewish scholars have it figured is those tricky Egyptians were so embarrassed at having one of their big men take the big dunk in the Red Sea they simply erased that particular Pharaoh from history and stretched the one before and the one after to cover the vacancy.

True - they managed to cover up the fact that the Israelites were never slaves in Egypt and the Exodus never happened as well. In fact they did such a good job on the cover up that they celebrate it every year.

You're not going to make much money with a fact-based religion.

Comment of the week!

This is so sad, yet so freaking funny! Sheesh.

DC clerk stalls marriage over 'foreign' New Mexico ID card

LAS CRUCES, N.M. — A District of Columbia clerk and a supervisor refused to accept a New Mexico man's state driver's license as he sought a marriage license because she and her supervisor believed New Mexico was a foreign country.

Gavin Clarkson told the Las Cruces Sun-News it happened Nov. 20 at the District of Columbia Courts Marriage Bureau as he tried to apply for a marriage license.

After approaching the clerk for a license and showing his New Mexico ID, Clarkson said the clerk told him he needed an international passport to get the marriage license.

Clarkson said he protested to a supervisor, who also told him that he needed a foreign passport.

The clerk finally concluded New Mexico was a state after Clarkson objected three times. The clerk granted the license to Clarkson and his fiancée.

"She thought New Mexico was a foreign country," Clarkson said of the clerk. "All the couples behind us waiting in line were laughing."

Clarkson, who is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation, said if he'd had his tribal identification card he might have had an easier time than showing his New Mexico driver's license.

In a statement, the D.C. courts system acknowledged the staff error to the Sun-News.

"We understand that a clerk in our Marriage Bureau made a mistake regarding New Mexico's 106-year history as a state," Leah H. Gurowitz, spokeswoman for D.C. Courts, said in an email. "We very much regret the error and the slight delay it caused a New Mexico resident in applying for a D.C. marriage license."

New Mexico was became a U.S. state in 1912.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dc-cl ... os?ocid=st

Izzatso.

1 in 5 Lack Basic Literacy in These 3 States. Here's Why That Matters.
Joe Carter

Adult illiteracy is one of the most overlooked socio-economic problems in America. Illiteracy can increase unemployment and poverty while lowering family stability and community flourishing. Here are five facts you should know about adult illiteracy in America:

1. Illiteracy is the inability to read or write. While complete illiteracy is relatively rare among native English speakers in the U.S., a significant percentage of Americans are functionally illiterate. A person is considered functionally illiterate when they cannot engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning of his group and community and also for enabling him to continue to use reading, writing, and calculation for his own and the community’s development.

2. In almost all of the 36 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a sizable proportion of adults (18.5 percent, on average) has poor reading skills. The OECD found that 50 percent of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at an eighth-grade level. About 11 million adults are completely illiterate in English. In three states—California, Florida, and New York—more than one in five people lack basic literacy skills.

3. Low literacy is associated with a variety of unfavorable labor market outcomes. Those with the lowest literacy scores are 16.5 times more likely to have received public financial aid in the past year, relative to those in the highest literacy group. They are also more likely to be in the lowest measured wage group, working full-time but earning less than $300 per week.

4. One study notes that twenty-five percent of adults who were out of the labor force were found to be at the two lowest levels on the literacy scale. Low skills costs the U.S. $225 billion or more each year in terms of workforce non-productivity, crime, and loss of tax revenue due to unemployment. Of adults with the lowest literacy levels, 43 percent live in poverty, and 70 percent of adult welfare recipients have low literacy levels.

5. Children of parents with low literacy skills have a 72 percent chance of being at the lowest reading levels themselves. These children are more likely to get poor grades, display behavioral problems, have high absentee rates, repeat school years, or drop out. However, low-literate parents who improve their own skills and are qualified to hold down a job with family-sustaining wages are more likely to have a positive impact on their children’s education.

http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/arti ... hy-matters

Live links at source

Are these states with high levels of non-English-speaking immigrants? It would be interesting to know how many native born are functionally illiterate.

The impact of the educational divide ...

Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two
A small group of well-educated professionals enjoys rising wages, while most workers toil in low-wage jobs with few chances to advance.
Eduardo Porter

PHOENIX — It’s hard to miss the dogged technological ambition pervading this sprawling desert metropolis.

There’s Intel’s $7 billion, seven-nanometer chip plant going up in Chandler. In Scottsdale, Axon, the maker of the Taser, is hungrily snatching talent from Silicon Valley as it embraces automation to keep up with growing demand. Start-ups in fields as varied as autonomous drones and blockchain are flocking to the area, drawn in large part by light regulation and tax incentives. Arizona State University is furiously churning out engineers.

And yet for all its success in drawing and nurturing firms on the technological frontier, Phoenix cannot escape the uncomfortable pattern taking shape across the American economy: Despite all its shiny new high-tech businesses, the vast majority of new jobs are in workaday service industries, like health care, hospitality, retail and building services, where pay is mediocre.

The forecast of an America where robots do all the work while humans live off some yet-to-be-invented welfare program may be a Silicon Valley pipe dream. But automation is changing the nature of work, flushing workers without a college degree out of productive industries, like manufacturing and high-tech services, and into tasks with meager wages and no prospect for advancement.

Automation is splitting the American labor force into two worlds. There is a small island of highly educated professionals making good wages at corporations like Intel or Boeing, which reap hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit per employee. That island sits in the middle of a sea of less educated workers who are stuck at businesses like hotels, restaurants and nursing homes that generate much smaller profits per employee and stay viable primarily by keeping wages low.

Even economists are reassessing their belief that technological progress lifts all boats, and are beginning to worry about the new configuration of work.

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Recent research has concluded that robots are reducing the demand for workers and weighing down wages, which have been rising more slowly than the productivity of workers. Some economists have concluded that the use of robots explains the decline in the share of national income going into workers’ paychecks over the last three decades.

Because it pushes workers to the less productive parts of the economy, automation also helps explain one of the economy’s thorniest paradoxes: Despite the spread of information technology, robots and artificial intelligence breakthroughs, overall productivity growth remains sluggish.

“The view that we should not worry about any of these things and follow technology to wherever it will go is insane,” said Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Semiconductor companies like Intel or NXP are among the most successful in the Phoenix area. From 2010 to 2017, the productivity of workers in such firms — a measure of the dollar value of their production — grew by about 2.1 percent per year, according to an analysis by Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution. Pay is great: $2,790 a week, on average, according to government statistics.

But the industry doesn’t generate that many jobs. In 2017, the semiconductor and related devices industry employed 16,600 people in the Phoenix area, about 10,000 fewer than three decades ago.

“We automate the pieces that can be automated,” said Paul Hart, a senior vice president running the radio-frequency power business at NXP’s plant in Chandler. “The work force grows but we need A.I. and automation to increase the throughput.”

Axon, which makes the Taser as well as body cameras used by police forces, is also automating whatever it can. Today, robots make four times as many Taser cartridges as 80 workers once did less than 10 years ago, said Bill Denzer, Axon’s vice president for manufacturing. Workers’ jobs were saved because the company brought other manufacturing work back from Mexico.

The same is true across the high-tech landscape. Aircraft manufacturing employed 4,234 people in 2017, compared to 4,028 in 2010. Computer systems design services employed 11,000 people in 2017, up from 7,000 in 2010.


To find the bulk of jobs in Phoenix, you have to look on the other side of the economy: where productivity is low. Building services, like janitors and gardeners, employed nearly 35,000 people in the area in 2017, and health care and social services accounted for 254,000 workers. Restaurants and other eateries employed 136,000 workers, 24,000 more than at the trough of the recession in 2010. They made less than $450 a week.

The biggest single employer in town is Banner Health, which has about 50,000 workers throughout a vast network that includes hospitals, outpatient clinics and home health aides. Though it employs high-paid doctors, it relies on an army of lower paid orderlies and technicians. A nursing assistant in Phoenix makes $31,000 a year, on average. A home health aide makes $24,000. While Banner invests heavily in technology, the machines do not generally reduce demand for workers. “There are not huge opportunities to increase productivity, but technology has a significant impact on quality,” said Banner’s chief operating officer, Becky Kuhn.

The 58 most productive industries in Phoenix — where productivity ranges from $210,000 to $30 million per worker, according to Mr. Muro’s and Mr. Whiton’s analysis — employed only 162,000 people in 2017, 14,000 more than in 2010. Employment in the 58 industries with the lowest productivity, where it tops out at $65,000 per worker, grew 10 times as much over the period, to 673,000.

The same is true across the national economy. Jobs grow in health care, social assistance, accommodation, food services, building administration and waste services. Not only are some of the tasks tough to automate, employers have little financial incentive to replace low-wage workers with machines.

On the other end of the spectrum, the employment footprint of highly productive industries, like finance, manufacturing, information services and wholesale trade, has shrunk over the last 30 years.

Economists have a hard time getting their heads around this. Steeped in the belief that technology inevitably leads to better jobs and higher pay, they long resisted the notion that the Luddites of the 19th century, who famously thrashed the weaving machines that were taking their jobs, might have had a point.

“In the standard economic canon, the proposition that you can increase productivity and harm labor is bunkum,” Mr. Acemoglu said.

By reducing prices and improving quality, technology was expected to raise demand, which would require more jobs. What’s more, economists thought, more productive workers would have higher incomes. This would create demand for new, unheard-of things that somebody would have to make.

To prove their case, economists pointed confidently to one of the greatest technological leaps of the last few hundred years, when the rural economy gave way to the industrial era.

In 1900, agriculture employed 12 million Americans. By 2014, tractors, combines and other equipment had flushed 10 million people out of the sector. But as farm labor declined, the industrial economy added jobs even faster. What happened? As the new farm machines boosted food production and made produce cheaper, demand for agricultural products grew. And farmers used their higher incomes to purchase newfangled industrial goods.

The new industries were highly productive and also subject to furious technological advancement. Weavers lost their jobs to automated looms; secretaries lost their jobs to Microsoft Windows. But each new spin of the technological wheel, from plastic toys to televisions to computers, yielded higher incomes for workers and more sophisticated products and services for them to buy.

Something different is going on in our current technological revolution. In a new study, David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Anna Salomons of Utrecht University found that over the last 40 years, jobs have fallen in every single industry that introduced technologies to enhance productivity.

The only reason employment didn’t fall across the entire economy is that other industries, with less productivity growth, picked up the slack. “The challenge is not the quantity of jobs,” they wrote. “The challenge is the quality of jobs available to low- and medium-skill workers.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/busi ... wages.html

Or too many workers are low- and medium-skilled.

From the anti-vaxxers to flat earthers: what makes people distrust science?
Katie Dangerfield

vid at source

From the anti-vaccine movement to the belief that the earth is flat, there seems to a growing distrust of science and institutions, and experts say it’s difficult to come up with an antidote to the erosion.

A distrust in scientific institutions and conspiracy theories are nothing new. Some say that the moon landing was a hoax; others claim Tupac Shakur is still alive. And then there are those who insist shape-shifting lizards in human form are in a plot to rule the world.

But the recent rise of flat earthers, anti-vaxxers and climate change skeptics seems to have caught people’s imagination and fueled wariness of science.

Over the past few years, the flat earth community has sprung up online questioning the validity of a scientific fact — that the earth is round and rotates around the sun.

And even though the link between vaccinations and autism has been scientifically debunked several times, some still question the institutions that provide this evidence.

But are these movements on the rise or have they always been there?

The rise of social media

Some researchers believe YouTube has contributed to a rise in the number of people who believe the earth is flat.

A study by researchers at Texas Tech University interviewed people who had attended the Flat Earth International Conference in recent years, and a majority credited YouTube as their gateway into the community. According to the researchers, some attendees said that they had been watching flat earth videos in order to debunk them, but became inadvertently convinced.

“There’s a lot of helpful information on YouTube but also a lot of misinformation,” Asheley Landrum, who led the research, told The Guardian. “Their algorithms make it easy to end up going down the rabbit hole, by presenting information to people who are going to be more susceptible to it.



Global News reached out to Google for a comment, but the company did not respond by the time of publication.

Dr. Harry Dyer, a lecturer in education at the University of East Anglia, said the rapid growth of the internet has made it easier for conspiracy theorists to find each other.

“I don’t see distrust of science on the rise right now, I just see more people speaking out about the distrust,” he said. “It used to be the odd person at the bar speaking about these things, but now these people have a platform.”

Experts now have less power than they used to because the traditional gatekeepers of knowledge have been lifted through social media, he explained.

For example, when rapper B.o.B tweeted about his belief that the Earth is flat in 2016, the post went viral.

Dyer said on social media, everyone can have a say about the shape of the Earth. Whether it’s B.o.B or a scientist like Neil deGrasse Tyson, both have equal footing online.

“The control of knowledge had previously been in a few institutions. Now we are seeing the knowledge of people who pry away from those institutions, and there are several different realities. That is why it’s hard to talk to flat-earthers — you cannot agree on basic facts,” he said.

vid re "flat Mars" at source

Matt Motta, a postdoctoral fellow studying the politics of science communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said there is a prevalence of these beliefs on social media, but whether this has increased in public skepticism is unknown.

“Tweets like B.o.B’s put these ideas out to the public, but whether or not they make people more likely to adhere to ideas is a different question. You gain followers, but you gain opponents, too,” he said.

Why believe in conspiracy theories if science points to the contrary?

Humans have evolved to have cognitive biases, said Bastiaan Rutjens, a psychology professor at the University of Amsterdam. This brain tool was useful when we were hunters and gatherers, he explained. Noticing danger and distrusting our senses helped us survive.

“Cognitive biases were helpful in our ancestral past, but they are not useful today,” Rutjens said. “A consequence of this is that we too quickly think things are related, such as vaccines causing autism. This really resonates with people, as we do see an increase in vaccinations and an increase in autism diagnosis, and then we are quick to believe they must be correlated.”

But he said this is not the case for vaccines as the autism theory has been debunked several times.



This is the “correlation versus causation” effect. A famous example of this is that rates of violent crime and murder have been known to jump when ice cream sales do. Does this mean that eating cream causes us to commit violent crime? Probably not.

When it’s is hot outside, people are likely to buy more ice cream, which also improves conditions for crime to take place.

vid re killer ice cream at source

Continued

Very lengthy article containing numerous live links and several more vids - too long to post in its entirety here

Wonder if those who dismiss science tend to be the more religious. It seems that way on the surface.

Yes, of course! Nothing to do with science. Say there is a major earthquake somewhat predictable along an active, major fault line. "God" either (a) allowed it to happen or (b) caused it to happen. It's "God's will" if you die, it's "God's grace" if you pray and live.

Repost of #71 above ...

How religion turned American politics against science

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz8VbAxkaDw&t=1s

If kids learn about science (or become educated in general) they might start questioning things they've been told all their lives. Things their parents believe. Things like the bible.

good vid

This actually dates back to 2015 but belongs here ....

The GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge
October 29, 2015
by Mike Lofgren

This post was first published at Consortium News.

In the realm of physics, the opposite of matter is not nothingness, but antimatter. In the realm of practical epistemology, the opposite of knowledge is not ignorance but anti-knowledge. This seldom recognized fact is one of the prime forces behind the decay of political and civic culture in America.

Some common-sense philosophers have observed this point over the years. “Genuine ignorance is . . . profitable because it is likely to be accompanied by humility, curiosity, and open mindedness; whereas ability to repeat catch-phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with varnish waterproof to new ideas,” observed psychologist John Dewey.

Or, as humorist Josh Billings put it, “The trouble with people is not that they don’t know, but that they know so much that ain’t so.”



Fifty years ago, if a person did not know who the prime minister of Great Britain was, what the conflict in Vietnam was about, or the barest rudiments of how a nuclear reaction worked, he would shrug his shoulders and move on. And if he didn’t bother to know those things, he was in all likelihood politically apathetic and confined his passionate arguing to topics like sports or the attributes of the opposite sex.

There were exceptions, like the Birchers’ theory that fluoridation was a monstrous communist conspiracy, but they were mostly confined to the fringes. Certainly, political candidates with national aspirations steered clear of such balderdash.

At present, however, a person can be blissfully ignorant of how to locate Kenya on a map, but know to a metaphysical certitude that Barack Obama was born there, because he learned it from Fox News. Likewise, he can be unable to differentiate a species from a phylum but be confident from viewing the 700 Club that evolution is “politically correct” hooey and that the earth is 6,000 years old.

And he may never have read the Constitution and have no clue about the Commerce Clause, but believe with an angry righteousness that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.

This brings us inevitably to celebrity presidential candidate Ben Carson. The man is anti-knowledge incarnated, a walking compendium of every imbecility ever uttered during the last three decades. Obamacare is worse than chattel slavery. Women who have abortions are like slave owners. If Jews had firearms they could have stopped the Holocaust (author’s note: they obtained at least some weapons during the Warsaw Ghetto rising, and no, it didn’t). Victims of a mass shooting in Oregon enabled their own deaths by their behavior. And so on, ad nauseam.

It is highly revealing that, according to a Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll of likely Republican caucus attendees, the stolid Iowa burghers liked Carson all the more for such moronic utterances. And sure enough, the New York Times tells us that Carson has pulled ahead of Donald Trump in a national poll of Republican voters. Apparently, Trump was just not crazy enough for their tastes.

Why the Ignorance?

Journalist Michael Tomasky has attempted to answer the question as to what Ben Carson’s popularity tells us about the American people after making a detour into asking a question about the man himself: why is an accomplished neurosurgeon such a nincompoop in another field? “Because usually, if a man (or woman) is a good and knowledgeable and sure-footed doctor, or lawyer or department chair or any other position that could have been attained only through repeated displays of excellence and probity, then that person will also be a pretty solid human being across the board.”
Well, not necessarily. English unfortunately doesn’t have a precise word for the German “Fachidiot,” a narrowly specialized person accomplished in his own field but a blithering idiot outside it. In any case, a surgeon is basically a skilled auto mechanic who is not bothered by the sight of blood and palpitating organs (and an owner of a high-dollar ride like a Porsche knows that a specialized mechanic commands labor rates roughly comparable to a doctor).

We need the surgeon’s skills on pain of agonizing death, and reward him commensurately, but that does not make him a Voltaire. Still, it makes one wonder: if Carson the surgeon believes evolution is a hoax, where does he think the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that plague hospitals come from?

Tomasky expresses astonishment that Carson’s jaw-dropping comments make him more popular among Republican voters, but he concludes without fully answering the question he posed. It is an important question: what has happened to the American people, or at least a significant portion of them?

Anti-knowledge is a subset of anti-intellectualism, and as Richard Hofstadter has pointed out, anti-intellectualism has been a recurrent feature in American life, generally rising and receding in synchronism with fundamentalist revivalism.

The current wave, which now threatens to swamp our political culture, began in a similar fashion with the rise to prominence in the 1970s of fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. But to a far greater degree than previous outbreaks, fundamentalism has merged its personnel, its policies, its tactics and its fate with a major American political party, the Republicans.

An Infrastructure of Know-Nothing-ism

Buttressing this merger is a vast support structure of media, foundations, pressure groups and even a thriving cottage industry of fake historians and phony scientists. From Fox News to the Discovery Institute (which exists solely to “disprove” evolution), and from the Heritage Foundation (which propagandizes that tax cuts increase revenue despite massive empirical evidence to the contrary) to bogus “historians” like David Barton (who confected a fraudulent biography of a piously devout Thomas Jefferson that had to be withdrawn by the publisher), the anti-knowledge crowd has created an immense ecosystem of political disinformation.
Thanks to publishing houses like Regnery and the conservative boutique imprints of more respectable houses like Simon & Schuster (a division of CBS), America has been flooded with cut-and-paste rants by Michelle Malkin and Mark Levin, Parson Weems-style ghosted biographies allegedly by Bill O’Reilly, and the inimitable stream of consciousness hallucinating of Glenn Beck.

Whether retail customers actually buy all these screeds, or whether foundations and rich conservative donors buy them in bulk and give them out as door prizes at right-wing clambakes, anti-knowledge infects the political bloodstream in the United States.

Thanks to these overlapping and mutually reinforcing segments of the right-wing media-entertainment-“educational” complex, it is now possible for the true believer to sail on an ocean of political, historical, and scientific disinformation without ever sighting the dry land of empirical fact. This effect is fortified by the substantial overlap between conservative Republicans and fundamentalist Christians.

The latter group begins with the core belief that truth is revealed in a subjective process involving the will to believe (“faith”) rather than discovered by objectively corroberable means. Likewise, there is a baseline opposition to the prevailing secular culture, and adherents are frequently warned by church authority figures against succumbing to the snares and temptations of “the world.” Consequently, they retreat into the echo chamber of their own counterculture: if they didn’t hear it on Fox News or from a televangelist, it never happened.

For these culture warriors, belief in demonstrably false propositions is no longer a stigma of ignorance, but a defiantly worn badge of political resistance.

We saw this mindset on display during the Republican debate in Boulder, Colorado, on Wednesday night. Even though it was moderated by Wall Street-friendly CNBC, which exists solely to talk up the stock market, the candidates were uniformly upset that the moderators would presume to ask difficult questions of people aspiring to be president. They were clearly outside their comfort zone of the Fox News studio.

The candidates drew cheers from the hard-core believers in the audience, however, by attacking the media, as if moderators Lawrence Kudlow and Rick Santelli, both notorious shills for Wall Street, were I.F. Stone and Noam Chomsky. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebusnearly had an aneurism over the candidates’ alleged harsh treatment.

State-Sponsored Stupidity

It is when these forces of anti-knowledge seize the power of government that the real damage gets done. Under Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, the Virginia government harassed with subpoenas a University of Virginia professor whose academic views contradicted Cuccinelli’s political agenda.
Numerous states like Louisiana now mandate that public schools teach the wholly imaginary “controversy” about evolution. A school textbook in Texas, whose state school board has long been infested with reactionary kooks, referred to chattel slaves as “workers” (the implication was obvious: neo-Confederate elements in the South have been trying to minimize slavery for a century and a half, to the point of insinuating it had nothing to do with the Civil War).

This brings us back to Ben Carson. He now suggests that, rather than abolishing the Department of Education, a perennial Republican goal, the department should be used to investigate professors who say something he doesn’t agree with. The mechanism to bring these heretics to the government’s attention should be denunciations from students, a technique once in vogue in the old Soviet Union.

It is not surprising that Carson, himself a Seventh Day Adventist, should receive his core support from Republicans who identify as fundamentalists. Among the rest of the GOP pack, it is noteworthy that it is precisely those seeking the fundamentalist vote, like Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, who are also notorious for making inflammatory and unhinged comments that sound like little more than deliberate trolling to those who haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid (Donald Trump is sui generis).

In all probability, Carson will flame out like Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and all the other former panjandrums of a theological movement conservatism that revels in anti-knowledge. But he will have left his mark, as they did, on a Republican Party that inexorably moves further to the right, and the eventual nominee will have to tailor his campaign to a base that gets ever more intransigent as each new messiah of the month promises to lead them into a New Jerusalem unmoored to a stubborn and profane thing called facts.

SOURCE

Numerous live links at source