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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

From Wikipedia:  A straw man is a form of argument and an informal fallacy of having the impression of refuting an argument, whereas the real subject of the argument was not addressed or refuted, but instead replaced with a false one. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be “attacking a straw man.”

A reader, Tom, sent me this for comment.  We humans are being told that we’re to blame for the temperature of the galaxy?

I’m happy to report that I don’t know anyone other than Tom who lacks the intellect to see this for what it is, or would have the level of dishonesty required to deliberately misrepresent the climate challenge on such a grand scale.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

No.

True, my net worth is closer to zero than a billion dollars, but, like virtually all 2GreenEnergy enthusiasts, I live a comfortable life of good nutrition, healthcare, access to information, and safety from the elements.

Perhaps the author’s point is that we should all be concerned about becoming homeless, and that this is a more likely disposition than billionaire status, which I suppose is true for many of us.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Maybe you’re wondering why “no one wants to work anymore,” or how it’s possible that 60% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck.

I hope this helps.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The circus that is the United States is built partially on the fact that half the country really has no interest in getting to the truth about January 6th.  They don’t have a huge problem with the prosecution of the foot soldiers who stormed the Capitol, but they clearly oppose the investigation into how this whole thing came about, as part of an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, thus overthrowing the U.S. government.

Incidentally, if Hunter Biden is guilty of a crime, I think most Democrats would join me in asserting that he shouldn’t receive special treatment simply because he’s the president’s son.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

A friend asked me the other day what I thought would be required to bring humankind together in a concerted effort to deal with the impending climate catastrophe.

It’s a big question.  One has to think that such an event would be initiated by governments, but the COP meetings have been a huge disappointment, having taken us essentially nowhere.  That’s because moneyed interests stand to lose big, but it’s also due to the fact that the challenge with climate change mitigation is that the problem is presenting itself over a period of many decades, not months or even a couple of years.

Yet suppose that this were not the case.  Imagine we had an alien invasion from distinctly hostile beings. Would our leaders be effective in coordinating an effort to protect ourselves?

Even in that case, keep in mind that a great number of these so-called “leaders” are obviously sociopaths, whose judgement is anything but sane.  Think about Kim Jong-un, Putin, Duterte, Erdogan, Orbán, and, from 2017 – 2021, Trump.   On top of that, you have 50-or-so lesser-known dictators whose rationality and love of the human race is questionable at best.

It’s possible that cooperation, the commodity of which our survival depends, hangs out of reach.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

One of the reasons that atheists don’t believe in God is that they don’t think His existence adds anything in terms of our understanding of the world around us. From Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, “If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.”

I offer this only to say that the secret societies, e.g., the Illuminati, the New World Order and the rest are clearly BS for the precise same reason.  Does anyone believe that some group of people, far wealthier than Elon Musk, have ordered him to buy Twitter and re-instate Donald Trump’s account?  That they’ve ordered Putin to invade Ukraine?

Now that there are people whose net worth is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars, the justification for even more powerful people has evaporated.  The existence of these cabals has ceased to add anything to our understanding of human civilization.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

A reader, Tom, submitted the graph below as evidence that climate change is a hoax.

Tom: If I were you I would ask why these data are so far out of alignment with everything we see in credible and reliable sources, e.g., our scientific papers and magazines.

As I was explaining to a friend yesterday, it’s not hard to cherry-pick data points to deliberately misrepresent the truth, though people of integrity simply don’t do that.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

There is only one explanation: The United States had become a land of “haves and have-nots,” the latter group consisting largely of white working-class individuals, angry at their failure to succeed financially, woefully undereducated, and as full of hate as they were of ignorance.

Along came a clever criminal who tapped into this toxic brew, and whipped them into a furor. His term in office was dominated by a huge spike in white nationalism, the rejection of science, xenophobia, and two impeachments.

Four years later, he lost his bid for re-election by more than seven million votes, but then came within a hair’s breadth of overthrowing the federal government in a desperate, seditious effort to stay in power.

Of course, all of this would have been impossible if congressional Republicans had had the courage to stand up to Trump’s lies and call him out over his vast array of crimes, but it was clear from the start that this wasn’t going to happen.  Here we had hundreds of folks with Ivy League educations and law degrees, who, for fear of losing their elections, pretended they were just as stupid as Trump’s base.

Eventually, this phenomenon, known as “Trumpism,” went dormant, but it’s impossible to believe that its ugliness and stupidity is gone forever.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

I like this, but I wouldn’t call blaming Biden for inflation “lazy thinking.”

It’s propaganda, carefully disseminated to uneducated people who are already conditioned to love Trump, many of whom have “Let’s Go Brandon” bumper stickers on their trucks.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

A good measure of the speed at which this country has descended is its seemingly limitless hunger for lies.  Voter fraud, the climate hoax, the ineffectiveness of masks and vaccinations, it’s all the same.

Truth has ceased to matter, and, at that point, the application of reason and rational discussion becomes impossible.

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