Barring a miracle, the average temperature of the Earth is going to rise somewhere between 2°and 5° C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the 21st Century. The planet will be ravaged by storms, wildfires, droughts, and the loss of land masses to sea-level rise.
What we do to mitigate climate change here and now has a profound effect on the outcome.
We’ve been warned.
As political commentator Bill Kristol says, the mainstream media’s coverage of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign ignores the fact that he clearly committed a wide array of crimes, among which is seditious conspiracy.
What New York Times columnist Charles Blow writes here is completely true, and more than a little relevant to today’s America. In general, we’re indifferent to the suffering of others who share our planet with us today, and we’re even less concerned about the well-being of our descendants.
Here’s an interesting article on the decline of Christianity in the United States, in which the author speculates on the reasons for the erosion: the Cold War, 9/11, and the Internet.
I would suggest that Americans’ spiking interest in politics is a big deal here, and there are numerous forces driving this:
• If nothing is done in the public sector to mitigate climate change, young people know that they are going to face great misery as they age. If anything, religion works against our efforts here, as the bible explicitly states that only God can harm the Earth.
• If we don’t pay attention to it, there is a good chance the United States’ democracy will collapse, as it almost did following the 2020 presidential election and the attempted coup. The fact that the religious right favors Trump does not play well with even moderately intelligent people.
• COVID-19 is probably not the last pandemic that will shape how we live, work, go to school, etc. Praying doesn’t seem to help, though epidemiologic science does.
• Christianity is even more disconnected from the teachings of Christ than it’s been in the past, and many of its most visible leaders are some of the worst people imaginable.
As people apply reason to find solutions to the existential threats they face and become more attuned to science, they come to realize that religion doesn’t add value to their lives.
Of course, some people say that religion and science can coexist peacefully, but that’s never seemed true to me. As I once told one of my nephews, “You can’t have your metaphysical cake and eat it too. You either believe in things that are provably true, or you don’t. The choice is yours to make.”
At left is a post that’s going around Trump’s social media platform “Truth Social.” A few points:
Promoting violence in all cases is a criminal act, though it somehow seems even worse in that it’s in response to a string of Trump’s lies.
This is dangerous and needs to be stopped. Trump has already proven that he’ll stop at nothing to regain the U.S. presidency, and a civil war would suit him just fine.
It’s time that the Justice Department did something to protect the American people before the shooting starts and innocent folks die. Is that asking too f***ing much?
Apparently, the pathetic old fool who wrote this is unaware that there are hundreds of his brother idiots serving prison sentences who were convicted on precisely these charges. The answer to the question “What we got to lose?” is “dying in prison.”
I don’t think educated people are offended by shirts like this as much as they are amused.
There will always be morons among us, and there’s really nothing that can be done about that.
As I’m sure readers are aware, some of these posts are inspired purely by images that are distributed on social media. I really love the one to the left.
Trump is finished, because too many Republicans have grown tired of the lies and criminality. They love the white supremacy and the economic punishment he inflicts on lower- and middle-class Americans, but they’re done with the fraud and seditious conspiracy.
Decent people around the world want to see Trump incarcerated, but he’ll still be irrelevant in U.S. politics, even if that doesn’t happen.
Re: the meme here, let’s be honest. Until a few years ago, the idea of removing controversial books from school libraries never occurred to anyone. We didn’t need book police to determine what was right or wrong for our children, simply because we trusted our teachers and other faculty members.
That was before teachers’ failure to comply with Florida’s new book laws became a felony, and long before these folks’ pay was cut so as to make their lives completely miserable, forcing many of the best of them to quit.
Preventing our kids from reading The Grapes of Wrath, because it challenges the premise of unbridled capitalism, is a new idea to the United States, a country founded on the free expression of ideas and the concept of critical thinking.
Yet here we are.
In other (though related) news, Trump, desperately hoping that American ignorance will protect him from criminal prosecution, hasn’t yet selected a running mate for his bid for a second term in 2024, after his unsuccessful bid to overthrow the U.S. government following his loss in 2020.
Yes, McDonald’s can pay its employees in the states more, but it doesn’t have to, so it won’t.
Like every other law in the United States, the legislation that governs labor is made by people who receive enormous campaign donations from the wealthiest folks in the country, and guess what: they want wages as low as possible.
The fact that low-income wage earners are working two or three jobs, some living in their cars, is of no concern whatsoever to McDonald’s and its multi-millionaire franchisees.
Our culture is deeply rooted in guns and violence. And, as a nation taken as a whole, we seem to have very little capacity to pull ourselves out.
Tomorrow, next year, and a decade from now, it appears that we’ll still be talking about police department units with astronomically high rates of complaints of unnecessary brutality, and how our Second Amendment provides our citizens the right to carry weapons of war.
There will be funerals for young black men, a few police going to prison, and numerous protest demonstrations.
The meme here suggests just how powerless and frustrated we are.
Of course, the “blue lives matter” people will be asking if we want police to stop thwarting crime. No. We want to them to stop executing innocent black men, especially via torture. God damn it.
