The money I made in my marketing services company had nothing to do with my father’s money, nor his connections.  So, does that mean luck was not a factor?

Hardly.  I was adopted shortly after my five-month birthday by two of the finest people on the planet, who sacrificed greatly to put me through a terrific private school in Philadelphia, and a fabulous private college in Connecticut.

At this point, I ask the reader to consider, as I do frequently, how terribly wrong this could have gone, even setting aside the fact that my biologic mother could have aborted an unwanted pregnancy.

Not all adopting parents are intelligent, prosperous, dedicated to their kids’ education, generous, and sober.

IMO, successful businesspeople who discount their luck are kidding themselves.

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This quote from early psychologist Wilhelm Reich is the reason that the material here on the 2GreenEnergy blog has transitioned over the years from science/technology to politics.  At this point, the impediment to accepting renewable energy and climate change mitigation strategies more generally has very little to do with facts and everything to do with, as he puts it, “feelings and beliefs.”

Of course, I doubt that these posts, which I hope to be emotionally evocative, change too many people’s ways of thinking.  Recent studies in neurology show that people’s minds are “wired” in ways that are deeply resistant to change.

If you are, for example, a Trump supporter, there is nothing I can possibly write that will make you wake up tomorrow wanting to save people you don’t know from droughts, wildfires, floods, and loss of land mass.

To be fair, there are no news headlines that are going to make me think that Mexicans are coming for our jobs and that a wall on the southern border is a good idea.

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I seldom watch political speeches, regardless of who’s talking, but I did catch a few minutes of Biden’s State of the Union.

And I noticed exactly what Rob Reiner is saying here.  The U.S. President says he’ll defend the nation against foreign aggression, that there are 12 million new jobs, etc., and the Speaker of the House doesn’t applaud?

I just can’t understand how any decent American, regardless of party affiliation, finds that acceptable.

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…Listen very closely: no one cares.

From this:  According to reporting from Bloomberg, George Santos told potential donors that he had been a producer for the Broadway musical, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” However, he was not involved with the production at all, according to the show’s lead producer.

Seriously, we simply don’t care.  Not when we have a former president who did everything he could to overthrow our government in a attempted coup, and somewhere near half of us have essentially no appetite for bringing him to justice.

This is particularly egregious given that:

Our Department of Justice has more than enough evidence to sentence you or me to hundreds of years in prison if either of us had committed that crime, and hasn’t taken any action against him at all, and

He’s very likely to be re-elected in 2024, and take our country to a place where dozens of fascist countries are today, with autocratic regimes led by cruel dictators who have dissenters arrested and tortured.

Again, about half the nation views Trump as a national hero.

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I have a great deal of respect for Maher’s talent, and usually for his ideas as well, but I simply don’t get his presentation in the video below. No one, woke or otherwise,  is trying to “re-invent the very nature of human beings.”

The “woke revolution,” if there is such a thing, is simply an extension of the “kindness revolution,” whose spokespeople are folks like the Dalai Lama. It simply means: You have a choice to make about the way you behave around other people: you can be kind and respectful, striving to be enlightened members of the human civilization, and accepting of the world’s people, or you can choose to be an asshole. (more…)

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Sarah Huckabee Sanders is as good a pick as any to deliver the Republicans’ rebuttal following Biden’s speech this evening.  As Trump’s press secretary, she garnered vast experience spinning baldfaced lies into statements that tens of millions of people apparently found credible.  Following that, she became the governor of one of the least educated, most backwards states in the union, addressing voters who can’t get enough of her anti-science and racist rhetoric.

So what if the economy is strong, unemployment is at a record low, and landmark bills have been signed into law in healthcare and infrastructure.

There will be lots of people watching, wanting to know:  What’s on Hunter Biden’s laptop?

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Don’t expect “manufactured grievances” to cease being a feature of U.S. politics as long as there are voters stupid enough to believe in their merits.

Tens of millions of idiots still believe that Trump is the rightful president.

We live among them.

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From Fox News.

Getting a standing ovation is a big deal for a politician, even if the words that brought on that praise are based on hate and stupidity, and probably violate the U.S. Constitution.

My first reaction to this is that people who live in states like Oklahoma, i.e. a state very close to the bottom in terms of education, deserve what they get.  Why not pack your stuff and get out?

Then I remind myself that there are people who can’t afford to do that, and whose rights need to be protected from vermin like Governor Stitt.

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Good point here, but I look at this slightly differently.

My ancestors were English, but I’m not proud of that. What’s there to be proud of that is associated with the spot on the globe that your great grandfather happened to have been born?

I urge people to be proud of their accomplishments and whatever virtues they possess, not of some accident of birth.

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This ad says its product “warms up any room in minutes.” Well, I guess the questions are how many minutes, how big is it, and how cold is it.

500 Watts is about one-third the power of your hair drier.  Imagine firing up your hair drier in a cold room and expecting it to make you toasty warm.  Then multiplying that time by a factor of three.

If you have no trouble with that math, you might have the intelligence to understand that this ad is a lie.