Healthcare Should Be a Human Right
There are many ways of explaining why healthcare should not be a profit-making enterprise, but this one from film documentarian Michael Moore seems especially on-point.
Tagged with: Healthcare Should Be a Human Right
The Cost of Ignorance
As Ben Franklin observed in the 18th Century, ignorance imposes huge costs on society in many different forms. Sure, crime is among them, but take a look at what just happened here in the U.S. in November.
The most poorly schooled among us teamed up with people with no moral education to elect a man who is under indictment for trying to overthrow the federal government.
Educated people voted overwhelmingly against Trump, but we were no match.
In terms of cost, just wait to see the actual price tag of the Trump administration’s Project 2025. In particular, the cost of cleaning up the long-term environmental damage wreaked by massive amounts of environmental deregulation is going to be hard to fathom.
Tagged with: Trump administration's Project 2025
Christianity Isn’t Retreating
This guy makes an interesting point, one we’ve all encountered many times: science will replace religion.
But if he were correct, Christianity would have begun to fade out in the 1860s and would be long gone by now.
Tagged with: science and Christianity
Environmentalism Is Passing Through a Phase
Before the early 1960s, very few people believed that Earth’s environment needed to be protected. In fact, the prevalent thinking at the midpoint in the 20th Century was that the environment is here to serve humankind, that anything we did to harness it for our liking was a God-given right.
Right now, it could be said that environmentalism is being “ridiculed” or “violently opposed,” at least in the United States. The majority of voters view people like me and my 2GreenEnergy readers as woke sissies. The incoming Trump administration and its Project 2025 plan to obliterate as much of the meager progress that this country has made as possible.
I do predict a day when concerns for the environment are “accepted as self-evident,” as they are in places like Europe, but it’s unclear at this point how much damage will have been done, and how much of that damage will prove to be permanent.
Getting Rid of Liberals
A reader sent me the meme at left and replied: “Liberals!”
Ha! You’re not alone in your beliefs. But when we’re gone, you will be living in a country that features:
• Lousy education and even higher levels of ignorance and illiteracy.
• Life controlled by the billionaires. Extreme levels of corruption. Your next Secretary of Defense could be an alcoholic Fox News anchor, and your next Secretary of the Navy could be someone with literally zero military experience who’s only qualification was hosting a fund-raiser for Trump at his mansion. (Oops–that’s happening now.)
Tens of millions of people without healthcare, who either die from treatable diseases or lose their life savings to medical bills.
• The rejection of science, brought to you by anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, flat-Earthers, and all manner of other crackpots.
• Possibly, all the other stuff that liberals have brought to our society: women suffrage, the 40-hour work week, civil rights, the abolition of slavery, etc.
I won’t be on this planet to see the effects of everything you seem to want so dearly. Best of luck.
High-Speed Rail May Not Be for the United States
High-speed rail is nice, but there are obvious challenges associated with it here in America, e.g., obtaining the required easements and dealing with what I know to be the considerable resistance from the airline industry.
We may need to accept the fact that this isn’t going to happen, especially considering that our planet is rapidly losing its capacity to support organized human society.
If I were writing the budget for U.S. government spending, I would prioritize education and infrastructure that decarbonizes our energy and transportation sectors.
Trump Wants to Jail his Opponents
This guy is correct. History books will record the truth.
Now, it’s possible that the next four years are going to feature some really sickening “banana republic” stuff, i.e., a president’s using his power to (at least try to) jail his opponents, but this won’t last forever.
Tagged with: Trump Wants to Jail his Opponents
Honor and Fraud
What Sophocles said here was widely accepted in the U.S. when I was a young man, say 50 years ago. Today, you’ll find shockingly few Americans who actively live according to this rule.
This is why, to take an example, the Volkswagen emissions scandal was so astonishing. When I was a consultant to the tech giants from the 1980s to the late 2000-aughts, anyone proposing that his company design its products with a hidden piece of software such that they passed government testing, but functioned differently in the real world would have been immediately fired and escorted off the premises.
Same for the guy who suggested that Wells Fargo create millions of fraudulent accounts, to steal huge sums of money from their customers. Bye!
Now, corporations that bilk their customers are the rule, rather than the exception.
Sophocles, you were a good man.
Tagged with: corporations that bilk their customers
Colonizing Other Planets
Does exporting humankind’s woes to another planet seem like a reasonable idea?
Do we really want greed, fascism, war, poverty, ignorance, racism, tribalism, the rationing of healthcare, and xenophobia on Mars?
What would this accomplish of any value?
Tagged with: colonizing Mars
Corruption Further Expands the Wealth Gap
“The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the knowledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down.”
~Upton Sinclair, from “The Jungle”
Keep in mind that Sinclair (pictured at left) wrote this about 100 years ago, long before anyone dreamed of the level of quid pro quo and rank corruption that we’re seeing under Trump.
For example, in Herbert Hoover’s day, we didn’t have huge donors to presidential campaigns with no military experience appointed Secretary of the U.S. Navy (see pic of financier John Phelan). It never would have entered the mind of a president in that period of history to do something so bald-faced.
