As for the whole “Celebrity opinions on weighty issues” matter, I always like to cite the Star Trek cast as evidence against actors being taken seriously about anything.
When I used to go to Star Trek conventions, there was once some poor social cripple who would ask the late James “Scotty” Doohan about some complex engineering question about “What would happen if the Enterprise was no longer able to use dilithium crystals for fuel?” And poor James, PBUH, would stand there uncomfortably, mutter something in the Scotty voice about “Err.. she’d be limpin’ along on one cylider, wouldn’t she? Next question…”
Now, the details of warp drives are a load of nonsense, but there’s a lot of Trek books written on the subject (I’ve got a shelf full of them). And further, Mr. Doohan really hadn’t done much since 1966 that didn’t require him to talk about squeezing more power out of the dilithium crystals. And that shelf of Trek Tech manuals I mentioned exists solely to make him sound more authoritative when he talks about it. And he couldn’t put a sentence together about it when he didn’t have a script in front of him.
Every day, for the past 40+ years, George “Sulu” Takei hasn’t really done anything that didn’t require him to say “entering standard orbit, Captain,” and if you were to quiz him on the specifics of what a standard orbit entails, he would stammer dumbfoundedly.

My point is, if actors who have played the same part for four decades can’t tell you the first thing about what their characters were actually doing, then why in the name of Taylor Swift’s burgundy-painted toenails should we listen to actors’ opinions of real, complicated, serious issues based on far less experience? You wouldn’t ask Walter “Chekov” Koenig to plot you a course to Alpha Centauri instead of actual astronomers just because he spent 40 years playing a Starfleet navigator, so why should Meryl Streep lecture Congress about banning pesticides because she spent six months filming a movie where she plays a farmer’s wife, and be treated like a bigger expert than the people who actually work on the ranch where she got to play pretend?

… yeah, I went there…

BTW, David Hateyah you are a racist dumbass.

Beyonce, beautiful on the inside as well as on the outside. She deserves a round of applause for this one.

Regarding the president, he would have looked like even more of an ass than he did when he stuck up for the raging professor if he backed up Kanye. What was he going to say (“Taylor Swift should have known better than to provoke Kanye by winning that award like that…”)?

1) Beyonce got a chance to show what a TRUE class act looks like, and

2) We found something we can agree with the President about (When he called Kanye a jackass)

You might very well be right. But in the end, optimism is always more productive than pessimism, if only because pessimism just doesn’t lead to anything worth doing (unless you’re trying to prevent something).”

Yeah, I tend to be pretty pessimistic and am pretty cynical. Hence my statement. I also equate pessimism with realism. I would love to think that we can turn it around, but I have a pretty bad feeling that this whole thing isn’t going to end up well at all.

“If you’re looking for encouragement, I would simply comment on this: So far, every single downward-slide action, has been met with an equal and opposite “WTF???” reaction. This past weekend’s event is sufficient as an example. I would argue the “WTF???” moment has always been there, each and every time, all you have to do is have your eyes open to it.”

Oh, there’s no doubt there are a lot of “WTF” people out there. The question is whether it’s too little, too late. I work at a university and the students I see (even grad students) are just utterly brainwashed. And remember that many of these people are going to have kids (horrors of horrors!). Those kids will have these goofballs as their mentors so I can’t wait to see what they’re capable of. It just seems that since the Boomers, we’ve been going in a steadily and increasingly wrong direction and the longer it goes on, the more unlikely we’ll be able to turn the ship around.

“And throughout human history, every revolution has been started with a nice healthy “WTF???”

True, and many of those have been extremely bloody affairs. Are you really willing to have this country drenched in blood to turn it around (and yes I’m aware of the possibility of that happening as much as it turns me off)?

This is the cool thing about America. We are allergic to socialism; resistance to it is written into our DNA.”

Don’t count on that. I’ve heard plenty of people say “it can never happen here…” It doesn’t really take much to implement and I’d even argue that we’re already on our way with all the current nonsense we have now.

“The sad part is, we tend not to see it coming. It’s like a dish we cannot eat, but we keep getting suckered into ordering it because we like the smell.”

Very true. We also tend to be a culture that’s extremely short-sighted. Hence my comments above. We’re a very opportunistic society. That’s one of our great strengths and also one of our greatest weaknesses.

When you get people stuck on an idea that they don’t have to worry about anything because the government will provide everything for them, it’s very seductive. Unfortunately, critical thinking seems to be in short supply these days for most people.

The way I ultimately see it is that we have a chance to reverse this, true. However, that window of opportunity is shrinking every day.