It’s been almost 30 years since O.J. Simpson went on trial for murder in one of the highest profile criminal cases in U.S. history.
What’s about to happen here and now with the 91 felony counts against Donald Trump, however, will dwarf the Simpson affair. A former president. A candidate for re-election. A huge conspiracy to overthrow the federal government.
Brings me smiles too.
In response to the remarks of Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of our U.S. representatives, a reader writes, “Lol, God is “sending” an eclipse that we can predict hundreds of thousands of years in advance? So sad….”
Yes, it’s sad, but remember that her constituency is made up of people at the very bottom of the pile in terms of education. If you want people like this to vote for you, you’d better not be speaking about geology and astrophysics.
Love the cartoon below.
Seriously, however, people of good character boycott organizations that engage in oppressive business practices.
For me, that includes Amazon, Walmart, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Hobby Lobby, and Home Depot, as well as Chick-fil-A.
Question: It appears that battery EVs have won out those powered by hydrogen fuel cells. In the U.S. in 2023, a total of 1.2 million battery EVs were sold. How many times more was this than the total hydrogen propelled vehicles?
Answer: Can be found at Clean Energy Answers.
In 2010, when I wrote my first book: “Renewable Energy–Facts and Fantasies,” I wanted a chapter on hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, and so I turned to the local expert on the subject, Honda’s Steve Ellis. Steve was anxious to promote his “baby,” the Honda FCX Clarity, and he figured that my book was as good a place as any to make that happen.
Yet I wasn’t convinced that hydrogen had a future, due largely to the lack of fueling infrastructure. Where battery EV owners can unplug their toasters and plug in their cars, this is anything but the case with hydrogen.
And now, not to boast, but my prediction has come true: hydrogen-fueled cars are flailing in the market. From Bloomberg:
Despite billions of dollars of investment, fuel cell cars in the US are disappearing in the rearview mirror, overtaken by battery-electric models and stalled by hydrogen shortages and soaring fuel prices. Last year, drivers bought just 3,143 hydrogen cars in California — the only state that sells them — compared with 380,000 BEVs.
Hydrogen’s proponents aren’t throwing in the towel. Toyota and Hyundai are pushing fuel cell models, albeit at heavy discounts, and Honda just announced a hydrogen hybrid version of its best-selling CR-V. California continues to build new infrastructure. But for drivers and would-be car buyers, the practical experience of going hydrogen-electric is bad and getting worse.
My suspicion, and it’s not an original idea, is that the fossil fuel industry has been using hydrogen as a red herring for the last half century. The oil embargo in the 1970s created an imperative for an alternative to petroleum, then Big Oil (without any sincerity whatsoever), immediately began promoting its “commitment” to the “hydrogen economy.” Now, 50 years later, check out your social media feed and what ExxonMobil claims to be doing in this space.
It’s nauseating. In terms of honesty and decency, these people make Donald Trump look like Mahatma Gandhi.
Is there a single vegan on this planet who doesn’t love and taste the smell of a high-quality steak on the grill? I doubt it.
Sure, a few vegans believe that they will suffer fewer health maladies as a result of their practice, but most are motivated by the values associated with animal rights.
The saddest part of all of this is the thought expressed in the meme here: vegans have become the object of ridicule because they simply care about the suffering of lower animals.
As an American, I wonder if this level of stupidity exists elsewhere in the world. Do French or Japanese meat-eaters make fun of their countrymen who do not participate in this form of mass cruelty?
Again, I doubt it.
From this:
Federal judge calls out Trump for threats to judges and their families.
The photo here depicts a slice of life from 1905, before fire-fighting equipment had evolved into an early version of the trucks we have today. (To skeptics, of which I was one before I looked this up: both the source of water, the fire hydrant, and the modern battery to power the headlight were developed more than 100 years earlier.)
This is a reminder of how the last 120 years, due purely to improvements in technology, has made our lives safer, longer, healthier, more productive, and more convenient than they’ve ever been in the past. But, absent the improvement represented by developments in technology, many parts of our lives have gotten far worse.
In 1905, was it conceivable that today:
• The leader of one of our two political parties would be a criminal conman? Does any legitimate historian regard Teddy Roosevelt as a sociopath?
• The world’s #1 automaker, Volkswagen, which led #2 Toyota by over $32 billion in revenue as of June 2023, could have possibly decided, as a corporation, to rip off 11 million customers, and another 8 billion people on Earth who use their lungs to breathe, with its scheme to defraud emissions regulations?
• Wells Fargo, which was founded 41 years old before this bicycle was made, would be ordered to pay $3.7 billion in penalties and victims’ compensation for alleged illegal practices that caused thousands of the bank’s customers to lose their homes and vehicles?
We’ve made a trade, whether we want it or not, from moral decency to creature comfort and the gross abuse of the common American consumer.
All I can say about this personally, and I’m sure my thoughts are echoed by most of my peers who made their money in the late 20th Century, is that we were lucky to have lived and worked in a time in which business morality still meant something.
We’ve all heard the quote here attributed to everyone from philosophers to baseball coaches, but it’s a great piece of advice nonetheless.
It’s one of the reasons that I believe in the value of a liberal arts education. If you give a young person fours years to read great books, write clearly, and pose to himself the questions that have been on busying minds since the onset of humanity, you are very unlikely to be disappointed in the outcome.
At left are the words of the late British-American physicist Freeman Dyson, reminding us that science is always evolving in the direction of a better understanding of the universe around us.
The fact that we now have better vaccines against COVID-19 variants than we did in 2020 does not mean that epidemiology was worthless before these discoveries were made; on the contrary it represented humankind’s very best thinking on the subject.
