Home › Blog › Page 174

by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Quite a few of the people I grew up with in the suburbs of Philadelphia have turned out to be Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists; the meme here came from one of them.

I understand that there are distortions in the news we encounter, but I’m fairly certain that most of the central concepts are factual.  The world’s population faces existential threats in terms of viral pandemics and climate change.  There are ongoing areas of conflict between the Jewish and Muslim populations in the Middle East, which right now are causing grave human rights violations.  Donald Trump is facing 91 felony changes stemming from four criminal indictments, yet he’s leading in the polling to become the Republican nominee in the 2024 U.S. presidential race.

To believe otherwise is untenable, if only because of the incredible layers of improbabilities that would have to all come together.

Take the idea that COVID was planned by the U.S. government.  What about the other 200+ sovereign nations on Earth, each of which had its own COVID-related challenges to overcome?  Did South Korea and Australia and Norway say, “Let’s not respond to the pandemic, because of some folks in the United States with no scientific training are saying that the vaccinations are lethal and the case numbers are exaggerated by several orders of magnitude?”

No, they did not.

These folks can believe whatever they want, but they should not expect the population of intelligent and reasonable people to jump onboard with utter nonsense.

Tagged with: ,

by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Here’s another reminder of how remarkable it is that Trump has any support from women at all.

It’s hard to imagine any self-respecting woman getting behind a candidate who has done so much damage to an entire gender.

Tagged with:

by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

C.S. Lewis is remembered as a gifted writer who touched the hearts of young and old alike. To those of you who didn’t have the pleasure and honor of reading “The Chronicles of Narnia” with your child, only to have the both of you bawling like babies at the end, I’d have to say that you might have missed something.

More notably, however, Lewis is among a slim minority of intellectuals who migrated from atheism into Christianity, as opposed to the other way around.

The point he makes here is valid, to a point.  I’d have been more impressed had he mentioned that “the importance of Christianity” applies equally to that of Islam, Judaism, and the other hundreds of other religions that exist around the globe as we speak, and to the many thousands of others that existed since humankind came on the scene over the last 200,000 years.

No one seems to be too upset about the fates of Odin, Thor, Zeus, and the uncountable number of other celestial greats that now exist only in the vast god-graveyard, whose deification lies only in human fear and ignorance.

In any case, a great man was Lewis.

 

Tagged with:

by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson makes a pointed observation here, but I wonder how true it is.

I grant that some of us need to be scientifically literate. Without that, our civilization could not keep up with things like vaccines against pandemics, while creating all other medical breakthroughs.  We wouldn’t have effective anti-ballistic missiles, climate change mitigation solutions, a deeper understanding of the cosmos around us, and the entire ensemble of IT and communications technologies that make our lives even more productive.

Keep in mind, however that anything of importance that’s happening in science in the 21st Century is happening at the outermost fringes of incredible levels of specificity.  What I learned about physics in college 50 years ago no more qualifies me to understand theoretical physics today than it enables me to fly to the moon in my Prius.

Another thing I would grant is that the 99.999% of us who are not “scientifically literate” in any meaningful way should respect the value of science, and reject QAnon-style beliefs, e.g., the flat Earth, the notion that COVID is a government plot, that global warming is a hoax, that Bill Gates is trying to enslave the population, etc.

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

This from former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich.

My perspective: the leader of the MAGA right has gone too far in his battle to regain the presidency in a desperate attempt to stay out of prison. The vast majority of Americans, who are not hateful morons, are outright repelled by his rhetoric, reminiscent, as it is, of Hitler’s Germany.

Tagged with:

by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

I agree with what Oscar Wilde said here, and I freely admit that it fully applies to me.

We have values that we derive largely from what we learn from other people.  For my entire adult life, I’ve chosen to read the works of certain writers, which is why I’ve come to believe that science works better than superstition, and that we have an ethical obligation to treat one another fairly and kindly, and to leave this Earth a habitable place for future generations.

In turn, people who read 2GreenEnergy, I hope, take away some of my ideas and incorporate them into their own.

Tagged with: , ,

by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

What mid-20th Century screenwriter/TV producer Rod Serling, famed for “The Twilight Zone,” said 50 years ago seems to have come true.

There really is no other explanation for Trumpism, a set of beliefs so lowly and base that it’s really hard to understand how American society could have possibly arrived here.

I met a middle-aged couple from Limoges, France (between Paris and Bordeaux) yesterday. They’re not thrilled with Macron, though they regard him as “just a politician,” i.e., one who will do whatever’s required to be reelected.

They say that Trump enjoys virtually no support in France.  I responded that this is not at all surprising given that country’s grounding in education, environmental responsibility, art, and other aspects of culture.

Tagged with:

by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

The graphic here shows why we do best to shop at grocery stores that source their produce locally, or at least as close to home as possible.

Even Trader Joes falls down here, to some degree.  They explain that every single SKU, e.g., a pound bag of sliced white mushrooms, should be identical in each of its 563 stores nationwide.  Sorry, but I don’t share that concern.

Tagged with:

by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Here, Marla Vous is pointing to our two-tiered system of justice, in which people at the top can do essentially anything they want.

As the poem below suggests, this has been a part of Western jurisprudence for quite a while.  Having said, it certainly has been elevated to an art form since Trump came on the political scene.

It sure would be good to see Ginni Thomas’ name at the top of an indictment.

Tagged with:

by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

As previously mentioned, FAIR is a national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.  It’s best known for its weekly radio program “Counterspin,” syndicated across 160 stations.

This week’s broadcast, “Richard Wiles & Matthew Cunningham-Cook on Climate Disruption Filtered Through Corporate Media,” explores how corporate media issues little honest coverage on the decades-long disinformation campaign that Big Oil is using to cover up what it knows about the climate change catastrophe and its efforts to continue the consumption of fossil fuels indefinitely.

At the same time the industry is pledging to make progress in decarbonizing our transportation sector, it’s increasing drilling in the Permian Basin by a factor of ten, while actively slowing the development of wind energy.

My favorite line from the show: “Right behind hydrocarbons, the second main product of the oil companies is lies.”

 

Tagged with: , ,