I started this blog as Reality Based Opinions then went to RetiredGuy. I explain my reasoning for this move in the post Reality Based Opinions.

But now I decided to go back. If you like this move, you might want to thank President Trump since he and the Trump adminstration are an important factor in my reasoning.

I started this blog in mid-2009. I suppose at least part of the reason I chose that name was a reaction to the George W. Bush adminstration’s referral to “reality-based community”.

This is from Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush By Ron Suskind:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The way I figured it, as a retired scientist I was part of the reality based community. It seemed to follow that my opinions were reality-based opinions. After a few years after I decide to combine my book reviews with this I start using RetiredGuy for reasons explained in the post linked in the first paragraph.

But over the few years I have grown tired of Republican and now Trump hostility to science and reality in general and frequently write about it.

So it is back to Reality Based Opinions.