From wildfires to nerds

What science denial, high school stereotypes, and political power have in common.

Above are photos when the Nakia Creek Fire in southwest Washington sent smoke into the Portland metro area in October, 2022, causing several days of degraded air quality. I took thse a few minutes before I watched the sun disappear completely for several days. Today the air pollution due to area fires has led to poor air quality again:

Trump is currently rampaging against Canada blaming them for the wildfires sending smoke across the US border. He is threatening to punish them for what he says is poor forest management by increasing tariffs. Of course, if he actually took the time to look this up he’d find articles like Is Canada doing enough to prevent forest fires from getting out of control?

He would find that his claim oversimplifies a very complex problem. A more accurate statement would be:

Canada could reduce wildfire risk in some high-priority areas through additional forest management and prescribed burning, but no realistic forest management program could prevent most of the massive boreal wildfires that have recently sent smoke into the United States

Trump's claim that Canada isn't "maintaining its forests" isn't just false. It illustrates something more troubling: government by bad science.

Bad science isn't merely a lack of knowledge; it's the replacement of evidence with politically useful myths. When leaders ignore decades of research on climate, wildfire ecology, epidemiology, or vaccines, they don't just sound like morons—they make decisions that affect millions of lives.

In the previoous two days I wrote about another bad science moron - Pete Hegseth - and his fixation on testosterone. In his macho idea about so-called warfighters not only demonstrates ignorance about who actually fights, and wins, modern wars, but about the science of testosterone.

We could also look at Trump’s ignorance about economics as evidenced by his notion that tariffs one of his favorite words:

Add to this his immigration policy which ignores the facts - call it the science - that immigrants whether here legally or not - are essential to the economy.

By sheer coincidence last light we were watching an old Australian police procedural, City Homicide, where a murder occurred in a high school and it involved a group of so-called “nerds” and a bully. As I write this now I fantasize about what some of our leaders - mostly men but possibly some women - were like in high school. Were they bullies who enjoyed intimidating the nerds or were they nerds who gained power as adults and finally can enjoy exacting their revenge…

Hmmm… someone could make a fifth sequel to the movie that spawned three sequels…

• Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987)

• Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation (1992)

• Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds in Love (1994)

• Nerds in Washington

Underlying my premise is the psychological observation that under the psychological skin of many bullies there’s an insecure non-too-bright Alfred E. Neuman type character… not to disparage the wit and wisdom of Neuman which has been the subject of a book and numerous articles > bottom of page see reference ¹

This is all fantasy, of course. We have no idea whether any of these people were ever nerds in high school—Stephen Miller might fit the stereotype, or he might not. Some may have been bullies, some may have been bullied, and some may have been neither.

The joke is that I'm calling them "nerds." Actual nerds would probably be offended by the comparison. Most real nerds I know have a healthy respect for science and facts.

Trump has expressed so many unscientific, even ridiculous beliefs or ideas it is hard to keep track or them or rank them. On Covid alone

Injecting disinfectant (”bleach”)

• April 23, 2020:

“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute... Is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside...”

Using light inside the body

• At the same briefing:

“...supposing you brought the light inside the body...”

Hydroxychloroquine

• Repeatedly promoted it as a “game changer.”

He also suggested the Covid test itself caused Covid

Wind Energy

Wind turbines cause cancer, Windmills kill all the birdsl, Wind power fails whenever the wind stops

Of course he once suggested using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes…

What’s next? Perhaps the following:

Getting in the weeds about this: science writers and psychologists have noted that Trump’s statements often share several characteristics:

• Personal intuition over expert evidence (”I have a natural instinct.”)

• Anecdotes over data (He often says “people say” which is a clue that he’s making it up.)

• Weather confused with climate (Clue: they don’t mean the same thing.)

• Simple explanations for complex systems (Here’s where Occam’s Razor doesn’t always apply. Sometimes complex phenomia have complex explanations.)

• Confidence presented in place of evidence (He seems to believe that if someone expresses a belief confidently it makes it true.)

• Distrust of scientific institutions when findings conflict with political goals (Too many example to enumerate.)

On the Canada wildfire issue - I wonder if he imagines Canadians with foul breath are making the smoke even worse.

Goes with:

Click above images to enlarge

1. From ChatGPT

Here;s the book: MAD: The Half-Wit and Wisdom of Alfred E. Neuman: Classic Pearls of Idiocy (Warner Books, 1997), illustrated by Sergio Aragonés. It collects many of the fake aphorisms, one-liners, and absurd observations that were attributed to Alfred E. Neuman over the years.

Beyond that, there are numerous articles and fan pages that compile Neuman’s “wisdom.” One of the running gags in MAD was that Alfred would be credited with quotations that sounded superficially profound but collapsed under the slightest scrutiny. For example:

• “It’s better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.”

• “The only difference between an optimist and a pessimist is that the pessimist has more experience.”

• “If at first you don’t succeed... destroy all evidence that you tried.”

Many of these weren’t original to MAD—the magazine happily borrowed, mangled, or reinvented old jokes and proverbs—but presenting them as the pronouncements of the world’s most cheerful idiot was part of the joke.

One thing that’s often overlooked is that Alfred himself was more than just the “What, me worry?” mascot. In earlier decades of MAD, he was treated almost like a philosopher of glorious incompetence. The magazine would run “editorials,” advice columns, fake inspirational sayings, and cover quotes attributed to him, making him a kind of patron saint of blissful ignorance.

Given the theme of this Substack —the contrast between genuine scientific knowledge and self-satisfied ignorance—Alfred E. Neuman is actually a useful cultural reference. His motto, “What, me worry?”, was intentionally absurd because readers understood he was supposed to be an idiot. The satire today is that some public figures express comparable indifference to expertise, but without the self-awareness that made Alfred funny. That’s a sharper point than simply calling someone a “nerd.”