Why Gun Law Reform Is Challenging
We are surrounded by people whose intellects are perfectly suited to accept the idea that more guns will make us safer.
Worse, their votes count just as much as yours and mine.
Tagged with: gun law reform
We Can Lie to Our Kids to Prevent Them from Being Scared of Environmental Collapse, But Is that the Right, Honest, and Most Productive Thing to Do?
From ultra-right-wing religious fanatic Mike Huckabee writes: Our kids are hearing that the Earth is doomed. Naturally, they’re scared—but they don’t need to be. It’s why (my) team created The Kids Guide to The Truth About Climate Change. It gives kids a close look at the facts behind climate change so they can feel safe.
“The Truth About Climate Change” claims to dispel the three myths from the screen cap here.
In fact:
1) Our kids are most certainly not “safe.” That said, there are plenty of reasons to believe that our civilization can limit the damage associated with climate change if it acts rapidly and decisively.
2) The situation is, in reality, getting worse. There are no climate scientists who aren’t in the pocket of Big Oil who refute this.
3) Ultimately, the cause is capitalism, insofar as it calls for a) infinite growth on a planet of finite size, an absurdity, and b) massive removal of laws that regulate environmentally destructive practices. Those who understand this, and who care about the fate of life on Earth, are proponents of what is called “conscious capitalism,” “democratic socialism,” etc.
For many different reasons, I favor being truthful with our children. It’s said that “honesty is the best policy.”
But beyond that, it enables them to get involved early. By the time kids are five, they’re old enough to understand that we all live on one planet, that this is our home, and that we need to take care of it. By the time they reach nine or ten, they can grasp the basic concept of anthropogenic global warming, i.e., that human activity is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, creating an imbalance in the amount of heat that the Earth absorbs and reradiates back into space.
Do you think for a moment that people like Huckabee and the others who do the bidding of Big Oil honestly believe that climate change is a hoax? That’s a sad joke. The Christian zealots, and Huckabee may be among them, actively welcome the end of the Earth and the ensuing events laid out in the last book of the bible, Revelation.
The rest are “people” whose life work is directed at enriching themselves, all the while knowing that their wealth is gained at the cost of inflicting unprecedented suffering on billions of people. They are the personification of evil. Relative to theirs, Huckabee’s crime is a parking violation.
Few People Want to Surround Themselves by Hateful Morons
I have to admit, if I lived in a place in which most people held these beliefs, I probably would move.
I’m reminded of a guy I met recently who is a retired university professor with a daughter who lives in Florida. Apparently, his kid suggested that he visit, and the dad replied, “I’d love to see you, but you’ll have to come out here (to California). I’m not stepping foot in Florida, for any reason whatsoever.”
Tagged with: hateful morons
MAGA Candidates Are Plentiful, But They’re Going Down
Huge voter turnout is precisely what’s needed here, and, fortunately, it’s bound to happen.
Before 2016, being apolitical was an option for some people, not any longer.
It would make sense that a moderate Republican could become the next U.S. president, but here’s the problem: there are more unicorns in this country.
Tagged with: MAGA Candidates Are Plentiful
Indictment of DC Police Lieutenant Raises a Disturbing Question
From this:
A Washington D.C. police lieutenant was arrested and charged Friday with obstruction of justice and making false statements over allegations that he leaked information to then-Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy last month for his role in the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
The Justice Department announced Friday that Shane Lamond, 47, was indicted by a grand jury in D.C. with one count of obstruction of justice and three counts of making false statements.
This raises the question: In the case of a civil war, in which armed Trump supporters participate in an insurrection several orders of magnitude larger than that of January 6th, can law enforcement be counted on to uphold the law and defend the nation against the rioters, or will they simply join the riot? The answer isn’t at all clear.
One thing’s clear. If the insurrection takes place in the next few years, we won’t have to worry about the allegiance of Shane Lamond, since his treasonous ass will be in prison.
Tagged with: armed Trump supporters
The Revolting Lauren Boebert
One of the most sickening symptoms of the decline of the U.S. educational system is the quality of the people we elect to make the laws that govern our lives.
Tagged with: Lauren Boebert
What We Teach Our Children in America
Here’s Tom Hanks on U.S. history and the editorial decisions we make as to what we teach our children.
Of course, we live in country in which any progress we’ve made recently in terms of fairness and objectivity, may soon be erased by the Ron DeSantises of the world.
Tagged with: CRT
A Government that Works for Its People Is Not an Impossibility
I was speaking with a woman yesterday who has spent a lot of time in the Netherlands and says she still can’t believe how a country’s people and its government can work together so harmoniously and productively. The distinction between the Dutch and the Americans, she says, is particularly pronounced when it comes to transportation; all European nations are well on their way to expelling fossil fuels from their society.
Yet EVs (and bicycles) are just one example of how governments and the populations they serve can work hand-in-hand.
As we see in the meme here, Finland cares for its children–even after they’re born, if you can imagine that.
Tagged with: expelling fossil fuels
Could We Be Wrong?
Newsflash: Those who believe they have destroyed entire foundations of science that have been put into place over the millennia by doing “their own research online” are a million miles away from admitting any possibility that they could be wrong.
Tagged with: we could be wrong
The Ever-Controversial Elon Musk
I just met some of the people who built the transponder that SpaceX will launch into orbit around the Earth tomorrow morning, enabling, for the first time, the tracking of all aircraft around the world, even over water. Readers may recall that we still don’t know what happened to international passenger flight Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared somewhere into the Southern India Ocean in 2014.
I asked these people their impressions of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, which may have been indelicate, but I felt I had nothing to lose. As I expected, they had great things to say about his business contributions, Tesla in particular, but were unwilling to comment on his character.
I told them my opinion, that a) There is no question that what he’s done to promote the cause of electric transportation has been great, b) It’s a shame that someone with $150 billion can’t use some of it to solve the mega-problems we all face, and c) It’s deplorable that he’s empowering Donald Trump to spread his messages to the world’s people.
