Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

Here are highlights from today's stage of the Tour of Switzerland.

Yours truly at the Grand Canyon, nine days ago. Click to enlarge.

Health care, immigration, trade, diplomacy: These are complicated issues. Who knew? (Actually, many people know this; at least 3 million more than don’t). Think Will Farrell as George W. Bush: “This presidentin’ is hard!”

Dabbling in real estate with Daddy’s cash is like playing checkers compared with the multidimensional chess game of international relations and all the rest that a world leader must prepare to face each day (and by “prepare” I don’t mean watching cable television to see how your latest tweets are playing in the media).

President Donald Trump said he didn’t really need to prepare for the summit in Singapore because it’s all about attitude and relationships. This might work for selling a used car (and I’m not sure what kind of relationship we should cultivate with murderous dictators), but fluency with the complexity and history of an issue requires careful study and some kind of attention span.

Doesn’t the country need and deserve a chess player in chief?

PHILIP PANDOLFI

Shaler

Here is Kurt Schlichter's latest column.

So, the Democrats make up a phony crime, Collusion with the Russians, pay a fortune to make the crime sound real, illegally leak (Comey) classified information so that a Special Councel will be appointed, and then Collude to make this pile of garbage take on life in Fake News!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 14, 2018

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Logical expressions, whether purely logical or not, can be divided into strong and weak ones, just as success-words can; and as I have said, some of them are success-words as well. Examples of strong logical expressions are "entails", "proves", "verifies", "has as a special case". Weak ones include "is consistent with", "supports", "confirms", "is a special case or example of". Logical expressions weaker still include "explains" and "solves the problem of". (Here as elsewhere I generally take verbs as my logical expressions, but of course the cognate noun will be a logical expression too.)

All the above are in an intuitive sense positive logical expressions. Corresponding to them, and for the most part trivially intertranslatable with them, are negative logical expressions. Strong negative ones include "is inconsistent with", "disproves", "refutes", "falsifies", "is a counter-example to", "clashes with". Weak negative expressions include "disconfirms", "is an anomaly for", "poses a problem for", "cannot explain", "fails to predict".

(David Stove, Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult [New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, 2001], 57 [italics in original] [book first published as Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists in 1982])

Private Eyes (1981).

Here.

Here.

Here is Ann Coulter's latest column.