My wife and I often have discussions around this point. Why can’t people of kindness and decency speak as loudly as the greedy and the liars?
It’s simply not their nature.
Great thinkers have been saying this for thousands of years. Fools tend to have loud mouths; wise people say little.
An old friend is a big believer that the Earth has been visited by alien civilizations, and I’m flattered that he occasionally reaches out to me to get my perspective on articles like the one linked above. I have two observations:
1) I have no way to authenticate the content of this or the hundreds of other papers that have been published on the subject over the past 75 years or so. Especially in today’s world of disinformation, QAnon, etc., I’m suspicious.
2) Over the past 40 years, and especially the periods when I was an extremely frequent flier, I have asked, say, 50 gray-haired airplane pilots if they’d ever seen a UFO. So far, I’ve gotten 49 “definitely nots” and 1 “I saw something I couldn’t explain, but I wouldn’t call it proof of an extraterrestrial aircraft.”
It’s interesting, and extremely sad, that humankind is just now arriving at the point where it’s starting to identify exoplanets that may support intelligent life–just when we’re baking our own planet, and destroying our civilization with hate and ignorance.
The “Tea Party Patriots” say Justice Thomas needs our support now more than ever.
A critical part of American politics is the renaming of anything one side hates as “radical” and “extreme.”
Ask yourself about Biden’s “radical abortion agenda” and its “extremism.” What is it, exactly? Well, I suppose it’s Roe v. Wade, which had been in place for 50 years until it was recently overturned. It’s a woman’s right to choose an abortion in most circumstances, and it’s favored by the overwhelming majority of Americans.
Now, abortion opponents are attempting to use the 14th Amendment’s equal protection under law clause to protect human “life” from the moment of conception. Now that may rightfully be called extreme, IMO.
In any case, propaganda is alive and well in 21st Century America; in fact, it thrives as our educational levels continue to deteriorate. If garbage like the meme here is spread with enough ferocity, it becomes the truth. God help us.
Here’s a “patriot” who wants to sell you “Hold the Line” coins that can be given as gifts to soldiers, first responders, and others who “uphold our constitutional values” (whatever that means).
This may not be the only get-rich-quick scheme in the United States today, but no one has ever gone broke selling trinkets with blustery language on them to the MAGA crowd. And the business model here, selling an item that costs a few cents each to make for $9.97 apiece, sounds pretty robust.
As you watch this video on a new design for the future of transportation, ask yourself if this is something that could conceivably meet the needs of our descendants.
I can’t tell you what the future looks like, but I’m pretty sure I can tell you what it doesn’t.
Lots of jokes have been made about the passing of Pat Robertson, and the possibility that he’s burning in hell as God’s retribution for the televangelist’s having taken advantage of our nation’s poorest and most ignorant people on his rise to obscene levels of self-enrichment.
Here’s another good one.
Senator Tom Cotton is a Trump supporter and an overt racist from Arkansas. Here’s his message to his constituents in his effort to amass funds to support his reelection campaign.
Investing in my campaign is investing in securing the border, banning TikTok, getting the trans insanity out of the classroom, and electing tough conservatives up and down the ballot.
This is the level of hatred and stupidity to which we’ve sunk as Americans.
At left: Düsseldorf in 1990 and 2019.
Does this mean that we’re making progress at the global level?
No, but it does suggest that progressive actions can lead us all forward.
As suggested by this clever meme, American society is awash completely with untenable beliefs.
Worse, this terrifying phenomenon is not limited to the uneducated; of the five best friends I had growing up, two of them, one a medical doctor and the other holding a master’s degree in mathematics, grasp onto ideas that are no more substantiated than the Flat Earth theory.
I’m reading the popular book Hamnet, set in the 1580s, and I find it interesting to note that a key feature of life back then was it was distinctly pre-science. Because there were no better ideas, people believed in witches and demons, good luck charms, using cloth dipped in ashes to deal with warts on the skin, and dozens of other things that were abandoned as soon as the scientific method emerged, only a few decades later.
But what good is science if it is rejected by policy-makers and the citizens of the day?
