Indeed, the world needs a wake-up call.
We all need to recognize that due to our continued use of fossil fuels as our principal energy source, coupled with the destruction of our rain forests to make room for the expansion of the beef industry, we are committing ourselves to the destruction of the only planet we call home.
The woman in the cartoon here is actually author National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
She makes an interesting point.
At this point in history, most enlightened minds would like to see the United States move in the direction of the form of government found in most of the other developed countries, e.g., the “social democracies” Europe and Scandinavia.
This is a long way from Marxism, but it’s not completely deregulated capitalism either. If you live in Denmark and want to get filthy rich, you’ll run into the same marginal tax rates that we had here in the U.S. from the 1930s through the 1970s: around 90%. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be an Elon Musk or a Jeff Bezos, but it does mean that you won’t be able to get there without paying your fair share of taxes.
It’s no coincidence that these folks are mentally and, in many cases, physically the healthiest people on Earth; they have achieved that position largely by virtue of their political philosophy, which may be summarized as follows: We live in a human society. If it costs me a few extra Euros to eradicate homelessness, the death of relatively poor people with treatable diseases, and the ignorance of those without means to afford an education, that’s 100% OK with me.
At left is something 19th Century Scottish author George McDonald had to say on the subject of truth and why brave and honest people feel compelled to call their most cherished beliefs into doubt.
It speaks quite broadly, but most certainly includes the scientific method. Part of the beauty of science is that it is constantly trying to undermine itself. Sure, we believe X about climate science, Y about viral pandemics, and Z about the fundamental building blocks of the universe, but we’re also persistently trying to prove these beliefs incorrect, or at best incomplete, so they can be replaced by better understanding.
In preparation for my first book, Renewable Energy–Facts and Fantasies, I recall asking V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institute, one of the world’s most visible climate scientists, if he was aware that some people claim that he and his peers are steadfast in their positions merely because it enables them to take in more government grant money.
He laughed. “Yes, believe it or not, I have heard that. What these people don’t seem to know is that, regardless of what they may think about my character, is that I could actually become rich if I could prove that the theory of anthropogenic global warming is fundamentally flawed.”
We have to conclude that scientists in all disciplines have to content themselves with a cruel fact: that what they may believe today is under constant attack by those who want to alert us to a better understanding of the world around us, and that this indeed is a positive feature.
Here’s an article on a venture backed by Bill Gates to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
I’ve always been skeptical of these types of enterprises, on the basis of sheer mathematics. In this case, the technology involves collecting and baking biomass into rectangular solids the size of shoeboxes, covering them with an impenetrable coating to prevent decay, burying them in deep holes, and monitoring them indefinitely.
In 2025, the company predicts it will capture 15,000 metric tons of CO2, which is 1 out of 2.5 million of the world’s annual CO2 emissions.
If I were in charge of all this, I would simply grow trees, and turn the wood into building products designed to last at least 100 years. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that the next century will bring us to a place where we have vastly different issues in limiting/removing CO2 emissions.
I don’t go for “Angry Staffer’s” ad hominem abuse of Trump, but he makes an excellent point here.
Does anyone really believe that Biden makes decisions in the absence of a huge team of carefully selected advisors? He could be completely incapacitated and still be a far better solution than dictatorship.
In the 21st Century, the stakes associated with collective bargaining aren’t as high as they were 100 years ago, when we were talking about matters of life and death.
That said, it’s good to see union ranks swelling in response to corporate greed.
From this NPR segment on climate science:
Michael Mann, a professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania, has been awarded more than $1 million in damages after a trial in D.C. court.
Michael Mann, among the world’s most renowned climate scientists, won a defamation case in D.C. Superior Court against two conservative writers.
Mann, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had sued Rand Simberg, a policy analyst, and Mark Steyn, a right-wing author, for online posts published over a decade ago, respectively, by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Review.
Mann is partly responsible for one of the most consequential graphs in climate science, one that helped make the steep rise in global average temperatures from fossil fuel use understandable to a wide audience.
One doesn’t have to look hard on social media to find people with no scientific training claiming that climate change is a hoax, and, in particular, that the folks who have spent their entire adult lives studying the subject are charlatans and grifters.
I attended a lecture at the University of California at Santa Barbara a few years back at which the keynote speaker claimed that “what was once science now is politics, where people with ‘PhD’ at the end of their names are sucking down grant money to study a phenomenon that they know does not exist.”
This would have been an outrageous claim if it were made anywhere, but in front of hundreds of people at UCSB’s physics building?
Perhaps the case here reminds us that defamation is not covered as free speech. If you make baseless and slanderous claims about another person, be prepared to fork across some serious damages.
I just read this David Brooks piece from the Jan. 25 New York Times that my mom recommended.
There is no doubt that, if we read more and consumed more culture of all types, we’d all be better people, and our society would be capable of greater compassion, humility, nuanced thinking, and better problem-solving.
Yet how we’re going to get there from here is another matter. As Brooks points out, the last few decades has only seen the accelerated trend in our colleges from liberal arts to curricula that we deem of more practical use in terms of preparing us for lucrative careers, e.g., business and technology.
FWIW, I’m delighted to have a mother who, though a lifelong Republican, eagerly reads op-eds in what are largely regarded as the distinctly left-of-center media. The probability to have a mother who’s totally lucid at 97 is perhaps 1 in 100; the probability that such a person has real grit in terms of both her thinking and her integrity at that age is improbably small.
Talk about gratitude.
This really is what it comes down to.
I wish Biden were 30 years younger, or that a young progressive would swoop down onto the U.S. political scene, But in the absence of that, I’ll happily vote for an aging guy who has one core characteristic: he’s not a sociopath.
The meme here has been passed around on social media for some time now.
Every time I come across it, I make a mental note of the word “flawed,” insofar as it seems unnecessarily mild.
What’s the matter with “depraved,” or “vile,” or “unprincipled?”
In any case, I wish more Americans could be exposed to General Kelly’s assessment of Trump. If you’ll check out Kelly’s Wikipedia page, I’m sure you’ll agree that he couldn’t have gotten where he did without great acuity in his opinions of other people’s character.
