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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The fellow here raises an interesting point, but let’s keep things in perspective:  Trump attempted to overthrow the U.S. federal government.

Anybody with the IQ of a carrot understands that he is guilty of innumerable counts of fraud, but when the dust settles, it won’t be tax evasion or parking tickets that sends the former president to prison for the rest of his life; it will be that he did his damndest to remake the United States in the form of dictatorships like Russia and China.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are the great autocrats of the 21st Century.  The United States came close to having a third one.  That’s the reason Trump must pay.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability
Here’s a follow-up conversation on my earlier post, in which I discussed this article, that predicts the extinction of humanity within the coming few decades.
Reader A: I am curious as to why the extinction of a species is anything more than Natural Selection? Why is it a big deal? 95% of the species on Earth have gone extinct over the years. Earth has already experienced 5 mass extinctions we know of. Humans have only been on Earth for a blink in the grand scheme. Are we really all that different than other creatures? All that special?
Reader B: You go from, one day, impressing me with cogent thought to, next time, astounding me with unbelievable senselessness.  Otherwise, I have no words to describe WTH keeps your ears apart… but let me try:  Your thinking is the actual problem.
Me: I had never run across reader A until just now, but obviously, I’m with Reader B, who happens to be a friend.  It’s true that millions of species came into being and went extinct long before humans came on the scene, and yes, that was because they couldn’t adapt to changing conditions and natural selection gave preference to other species that were better suited.  Most importantly, these animals were not capable of using their intelligence to help them along.  In any case, there is no moral good or evil there.
There are several important differences in the case of human life, however.
In particular, humans are endowed with large brains that give us the ability to solve problems related to our survival.  We are capable of reason, and are morally obligated to use it in constructive ways.
Thus, things like first-strike nuclear attacks and failure to mitigate climate change to the point that it bakes our only home are ethically indefensible, because, unlike the dodo bird (see above) or the passenger pigeon, we are capable of making choices that would avert catastrophe.
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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Here’s an article that predicts the extinction of humanity within the coming few decades.  It begins:

In case you haven’t heard, we’re currently in the midst of Earth’s sixth mass extinction event, and it’s only accelerating. On a recent episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes, Stanford scientists dropped by to ring the warning bells again. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Here’s a meme that illustrates how U.S. politics has lost all sense of nuance.  If a proposal could possibly benefit the common American: better education, healthcare, voting rights, or environmental responsibility, the GOP will be dead-set against it.

Now, if you ask how it’s possible that anyone from the working class (especially women) could vote Republican, you’re asking an excellent question, and it’s one that has exactly two answers: hate and ignorance.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

This from long-time EV advocate Zan Dubin-Scott (pictured):

Hitching a ride to the near future, where one day soon all our trucks will be electric, like this (prototype) Tesla semi cab. Heavy-duty vehicles account for 10% of on-road vehicles but pump out 30% of transportation greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 60% of particulate matter, the fine particles that can cause heart disease and other deadly illnesses. S’why I can’t hate Elon. Tesla leads this sector.
Interesting point on Elon Musk–and a great number of people feel this way.
It’s just such a shame that the world’s (former) wealthiest person had to turn out to be a complete ass****.
$200+ billion could have gone a long way towards climate change mitigation, tackling homelessness, feeding the world’s children, fighting pandemics, you name it.
But no, it needed to be spent in an effort to re-elect a sociopath as president of the United States.
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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

This is funny, but in reality, there are tons of witnesses from outside the Trump family who have devastating testimony to give in exchange for leniency from prosecution.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

An oft-given piece of advice to bloggers is to try to fashion content that is “evergreen,” meaning focused not so much on current events that lose relevance over time, but on concepts that have enduring importance to potential future readers.

Here’s a post that couldn’t violate that recommendation more directly, because, a few months from now, no one will remember pathological liar and fraud George Santos and his freak arrival on the GOP political scene.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

This reminds me of all the people who said, going into the 2020 election cycle, that the Democrats needed a compelling message, that is it wasn’t enough to say, “We’re not Trump.”

My response: “I’m not so sure. I think most Americans are tired of this steady diet of criminal insanity.”

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Let’s start from the beginning.  There is no such thing as a “vaccination exemption.” And even if there were, you don’t need one.  No one can wrestle you to the ground and stab you with a needle.

That said, in the United States, the Supreme Court has consistently stood behind this country’s right to mandate vaccinations in times of great trouble, so as to protect its citizens from the anti-vaxxer conspiracy-theory morons.

This goes back to the days of the flu pandemic more than 100 years ago, where every kid got inoculations, or were prohibited from entering the school system, where American society was hard at work in its attempt to eliminate cases of smallpox, cholera, rabies, typhoid fever,  tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough), yellow fever, typhus, influenza, polio, chicken pox, measles, mumps, and rubella. 

If you want to subject your kids to these diseases because you think Trump won the 2020 election, or you think the world is flat, that’s fine. Just stay far away from the rest of us.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

What to make of the meme here?

Re: the existence of God, it’s a proposition one either accepts or rejects.

Speaking strictly for myself, from my years as a small boy, I’ve always been impressed with Occam’s Razor, the idea that the simplest answer is probably correct.  To me, that means God doesn’t need to exist, and therefore probably doesn’t.

When I asked my mother how all this stuff came here, and she said, out of desperation, that God made it, I asked immediately, “Who made God,” to which she replied, “Nobody knows.”

That set me on my course towards atheism at age three or four.  We all have our own stories to tell about our religious journeys.  Mine is probably shorter–and simpler–than most.

 

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