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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The ad here reads: Show your support for President Trump & The 2nd Amendment by hanging this limited edition yard flag outside your house, in your garden or wherever your patriotic heart desires. This is the perfect item for any patriot!

Fortunately, Americans’ appetite for this type of messaging is evaporating.  The Big Lie is on its deathbed, given the revelations from Fox News and Trump’s inner circle.  Yes, there will be a few morons who hold onto it, even as torrents of sworn court testimony rain down to the effect that there was no significant voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Soon, the word “patriotism” will return to its former meaning, where dishonesty and treason play no part.

Second Amendment fanaticism may be harder to eliminate.  The hardcore nuts have been thinking that Democrats have been “comin’ for their guns” for half a century.  The fact that there hasn’t been a whisper about banning handguns for sane adults to use for personal protection doesn’t mean a thing to them.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Scott McKie asks: Isn’t Fox News legally registered somewhere as a “news” outlet? And if so, what is the verbiage in that registration?  Could be interesting to see if they are registered and if so, could they be taken totally off cable by not adhering to what’s in that registration. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

Here’s a podcast of the NPR show Ideasphere, in which host Guy Rathbun speaks with environmental activist Andrew Boyd, author of the recent book I Want a Better Catastrophe.  Fabulous discussion, highly recommended.

Boyd is terrifically well informed about climate change and what must be done to mitigate it. He’s also quite the comedian–an unlikely combination to be sure.

I guess I should have been clued in by the kidding on the level title of the book.  Does anyone want a catastrophe?

Its concept, of course, is that some level of catastrophe is already baked into our future, and that at this point our descendants are incapable of avoiding great suffering as the result of our selfishness.  But is the driver really selfishness, or our blind and ignorant acceptance of the fossil fuels industry’s insistence, funded with hundreds of millions of dollars of public relations, that global warming is a liberal, anti-capitalist hoax?

It’s a 30-minute experience you won’t regret.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

We often hear people say how little difference there is between the two main political parties in the U.S. And it’s true that they’re both driven by money’s corruptive influence; lawmakers reward their campaign donors with legislation that benefits them financially.

Yet if we’re able to look beyond that sad fact, there are very few similarities between the Republicans and the Democrats, as illustrated by the meme here.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

I used to say that there are two types of Trump supporters: the amoral rich and the hateful morons.  I use the word amoral because most of these people are not actually vicious; they simply couldn’t care less about anybody but themselves and their families.

That was before all this ruckus went down about Fox News.  What can we say about Tucker Carlson, for instance?  Here’s a man who “hates Trump passionately,” but, in exchange for fabulous amounts of money, goes on camera every night and tells millions of viewers that the former president is a man of honor and great love for his country, who’s being unjustly harassed by the radical left who have weaponized the DoJ.

In summary, Carlson receives his salary on the basis of his huge capacity to make America a more violent, lawless, weaker, and stupid place to live.  That’s immoral, to put it kindly.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

This is what happens in a culture of intelligence and compassion.

The Dutch don’t live lives that are driven by religious fanaticism, censorship, lousy education, political fund-raising and finger-pointing, or misogyny.

The result?  Sanity.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

My wife was just talking about this earlier today.  “How is it possible,” she asked me, “that our world’s wealthiest people have so little interest in reversing world hunger or climate change?  What would they rather do with hundreds of billions of dollars? Wouldn’t they like to be remembered as great human beings?”

Good question, but the answer is no.  For most of them, their love of money, and their lack of interest in the welfare in the rest of humankind, is what drove them to their station in life in the first place, not to mention that most of that wealth, in more cases than not, was inherited from ancestors who had even less concern for others than they had themselves.

If you’ve ever delivered pizzas, as I did in my youth, you probably learned what I did: hope you don’t get a drop-off in a rich neighborhood expecting to get a tip, because it’s unlikely to happen.  Hope for a customer living in a trailer park who’s going to give you $10 that they clearly can’t afford, only because they know–and care–about the real-world lives of working-class Americans.

 

 

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

What was it, precisely, that brought us from where we were as few as ten years ago to where we are now?  The universality of the Internet?  The advent of Trump?

How did we come to a point where a plumber or a bus driver has come to think he knows more than climate scientists do about global warming, or epidemiologists know about COVID-19?

Whatever its cause, we have lost something extremely valuable in the process.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Yes, this is all completely true.

But let’s keep everything in perspective here.  Fox “News” is an extremely powerful institution.  Its business model is turning the truth completely upside-down as required to keep its audience engaged, and, given that it has no integrity, it has no compunction about doing precisely that.

Fox continues, at the astonishment of us all, to do anything it wants, regardless of how heinous, to keep tens of millions of hateful morons dialed in.  Though it’s possible that it may eventually be corralled via some blend of civil and criminal legal proceedings, right now it controls the minds, votes, and wallets of the most pitifully miserable of Americans.

If there is more violence (as suggested at left) as a direct result of its blatantly dishonest “reporting,” that’s just too f***ing bad for America and its teetering democracy, if it means more profits for Fox.

Is there anything we can do about that?  Not sure. Maybe we’ll find out some day.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Finding God may not always make someone a better person, but is it correct to say that it never does?

Yes, many of our world’s most evil people were/are church-goers, and from there, it could be argued that their belief in God did nothing to help them become kinder and more humane.

Further, one could say that these terrible people’s religion only solidified their confidence that their desire to …. (fill in the blank) torture suspected heretics, enslave the blacks, commit genocide against the Jews, invade a neighboring nation, etc., was ordained by their Creator.  As they say, “Nobody counts the bodies when God is on your side.”

It’s a hard question to answer.  Even most atheists know many fine human beings who walk around all day believing that God has a plan for them.

Personally, I’m taken by the rhetoric of folks like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens, who summarize their positions as follows: religion is to the human mind what a virus is to a computer.

 

 

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