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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

In 2024, Trump won more votes from people of color that any Republican had in 48 years.

From former North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson’s Wikipedia page:

(His) remarks made on Nude Africa included expressing support for slavery, using various homophobic, racial, and antisemitic slurs, enjoying transgender pornography, admitting to peeping at women showering in public showers without their knowledge when he was 14 and continuing to fantasize about the experience as an adult, self-identifying as a “perv”, and calling himself a “Black Nazi” and stating his support for Adolf Hitler over Barack Obama as United States president.[1][40] Another remark labelled Martin Luther King, Jr. a “commie bastard” and then stated: “If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!”[1] 

All of us, black and white, need to improve our ability to process information.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

The bottom photo here was taken 100 years after the one on the top.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a guy who leads a team of researchers at JPL in Pasadena, CA, measuring the strength and solidity of the insides of glaciers.  He told me, “We’ve been able to measure the exterior of glaciers for decades. i.e., their height, width, and depth.  And yes, from that, it’s possible to get some information about the rate at which they’re melting.  But how solid are they beneath their surfaces?  Some melt faster from the inside out, rather than from the outside in, and that’s extremely valuable data for those trying to predict sea-level rise with any real accuracy.”

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Question:  Primatologist Jane Goodall asserts three reasons for her optimism about the ultimate disposition of our planet’s health.  One is shown at left, i.e., all we need to do is stop poisoning and otherwise harming our Earth, and it will repair itself.

What are the other two?

Answer: Can be found at Clean Energy Answers.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

There are dozens of things to be sickened about re: the outcome of the 2024 election here in the United States.  But if you’re looking for the single most nauseating issue, consider this: Trump voters believe he has the backs of working class Americans.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

To the author of the meme here: great job.

I don’t think we’ll ever run out of ways to point out the hypocrisy of the MAGA Christians.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

I have quite a few childhood friends who are now Fox News acolytes, and I’m convinced that Fox’s “alternative facts” have inflicted untold pain on this nation and the other nations around the globe.  From their disinformation campaigns on COVID, to the 2020 election, to climate change, to immigration and race, this is some hardcore criminality at work.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The Americans who voted against Donald Trump in the 2024 election and the vast majority of the citizens elsewhere around the world will read this quote from Steinbeck and hope it doesn’t apply to U.S. democracy.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

Here’s a piece that suggests that the people of Texas are developing a cleaner grid-mix, because they’re tired of have huge swaths of residential land destroyed by hurricanes, e.g., Beryl of June and July, 2024.

This is a great example of something that I’ve been talking about for years: climate change is a global phenomenon, and making slow progress in decarbonizing the energy sector in a place like Texas will have an infinitesimally small effect on the local climate (even if the people of the state have the political will to make it happen, which they most assuredly do not).  In particular, the hurricanes that are increasingly devastating to Texas generally form off the coast of West Africa, generated and strengthened by rising ocean temperatures.

Of course, I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth, and any positive change is good, but I do want to add a dash of reason here.

As I told the emissary of Germany’s state department who asked me what his country could be doing better vis-a-vis renewable energy. After more than an hour of being peppered with essentially the same question, I finally responded, “In large measure, it doesn’t matter.  This is a problem we either come together and solve as a global community, or we’re all going to suffer in ways that are completely unprecedented.”

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

I agree with the author of the meme here, and I believe that if we were to follow the course he suggests we’d be a lot less steamed about these issues than we are now.

Having said that, it appears that science is in the process of proving that our belief systems are wired into our brains, and that we ourselves have far less agency than we think we do in determining how we think and act.

Take me as an example.   As readers know, I’m an atheist and a progressive.  From my earliest memories at three years old, I’ve been an animal lover and a disbeliever in God.  Mustn’t there be some basis for this in my genetic code?

In terms of experiences, I went to a private Quaker (pacifistic, non-violent) school, spent six years of college/graduate school studying Western philosophy, and had a business career that served clients in a dozen different countries.  You could take 100 people with this make-up, and I doubt you’d find a single Trump supporter.

Now, do I understand the far right?  Of course I do.  I had the incredibly good fortune to have all this line up, starting with my birth in Philadelphia, and my adoption at age five months by two kind, intelligent, and honorable people.  But it’s not hard to imagine having been born in Saudi Arabia, Paraguay, Mali, or Mississippi.

We all carry with us the idea that our basic personalities are self-determined, that we create our characteristics from our own choosing.  I question that.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Dr. Gregg Bloche, a friend who teaches at Georgetown Law School, said on a Zoom call yesterday that the U.S. has transitioned from “a cognitive to a non-cognitive” mode of politics and voting.

What a fantastic phrase.  It’s terrifying, of course, but it so accurately describes how it’s possible that a huge majority of Americans want to be led by a pathological liar, career criminal, and wanna-be dictator.

When I was a young boy, the parents of my little friends in my neighborhood in the Philadelphia suburbs weren’t rocket scientists, but they could (and did) read, and a person like Donald Trump would have carried less than 10% of the vote.

All that rationality and gentility has vanished in the blink of an eye.

 

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