Right now, we are seeing a slow but steady increase in the recognition that our climate is warming due primarily to the consumption of fossil fuels.
However, as 81-year-old climate scientist James Hansen said recently, it’s possible that, in his own lifetime, we’ll experience a climate-related event so terrible that virtually no climate deniers will remain.
An important part of the Republican party’s strategy going into the 2024 elections is to convince Americans that their country lies in ruins due to the incompetence of the Democrats in power. Unfortunately, this means amplifying every piece of bad news, and, in particular, telling bald-faced lies about important things like hurricane response.
Now, we have Republican leaders who are begging their team to drop this practice, because it’s damaging our government’s capacity to help its citizens in this time of emergency.
At left we see the governor of South Carolina; below is a senator of North Carolina.
Saptadip Pramanik submits this question and asserts that the answer is Aristotle.
Yes, he wrote “De Motu Animalia,” or, in English: “On the Motion of Animals.” But most of what he put forward there turned out to be simply incorrect. I love Aristotle as much as the next guy, but it’s hard to say that he was the “father of zoology.”
He was certainly the father of logic. For that, he will be regarded, until the end of organized human civilization, as the man. Imagine codifying a field of study in ancient Greece, and having seen no corrections and very few improvements 2300 years later.
How much misery can be created by inventing stories about Haitians’ eating Ohioans’ pet dogs and cats? I don’t know, but it’s limited.
Trying to convince folks that climate change is a hoax, on the other hand, is deliberately creating a situation in which the resultant sufferings is virtually boundless.
It’s very difficult to feel sympathy for those who get stung by Donald Trump and his well recognized habit of stiffing vendors.
Imagine that you’re the mayor of Minneapolis, MN and the Trump team wants you to open up a facility at which the former president can rally his base.
My response would be, “Of course. You owe us $530K plus interest, and, for obvious reasons, we’ll want a 100% deposit for the next event.
“You might want to consider, however, that Trump is reviled here. The reason he lost Minnesota by a whopping 7.1% in 2020 is that this isn’t Alabama or Oklahoma; it’s a state of well educated fair-minded people. Why don’t you just send us the $530K and forget about going forward? I’ll waive the interest, and you can take your business somewhere a bit more receptive to Trump’s message of hatred and ignorance.”
The author of the meme here has nailed something very important.
It’s the reason people sound so selfish and stupid when they say something like, “Oh, I’m not interested in politics.” It’s just another way of of saying, “I don’t really care about my own welfare, and I certainly don’t care about my children’s.”
Moreover, it applies to any of dozens of types of evil. Take “drill baby drill” as an example. Big Oil would love to have every American in support of the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels. And, as shown in the video below, they couldn’t care less about the consequences.
Perhaps the single strangest aspect to American political life today is that an entire party, one that not too long ago defined itself in terms of a strong military, now pays no attention to the observations of our top generals and admirals.
“Object permanence” is a term developmental psychology used to mean the point at which infants, usually at the age of perhaps six months, come to understand that the things around them like bottles, toys, and people don’t disappear simply because they go out of range of sight, only to somehow reconstitute themselves later, when they return to the baby’s field of vision.
The idea that the candle shown at left “regenerates” itself is almost as infantile as the belief that Rover vanishes when he leaves the room and then later comes back into being.
When they burn, the hydrocarbons in wax candles are transformed into CO2 and water, as heat is released. This process doesn’t build new candles.
Remarkably, there are people who believe that it’s wrong for our most visible artists and athletes to share their progressive political viewpoints. I use the word “remarkably” because generally, the folks most critical of, for instance, Taylor Swift, are staunch supporters of Americans’ rights to free speech.
Apparently, these people are saying that free speech is good, but only if you support Donald Trump.
Hypocritical much?
Those of us who were paying attention to the 2016 Republican debates that winnowed the field of GOP hopefuls will remember John Kasich, then governor of Ohio. He’s not unlike Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney in that he really doesn’t have a progressive bone in his body, but fairness demands that liberals regard him as essentially a sane and decent human being.
Having said that, I think Kasich is being diplomatic in what he said here. I believe the unvarnished truth is not that he has a problem with Trump’s fueling grievances, but rather that he can’t endorse a candidate who’s criminally insane.
Whatever the truth may be, here’s just one more Republican whose words serve to block a second term for the former president. Things are going downhill, and fast.
