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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

It depends on what you believe.

Fox News will tell you that our southern border is no longer being overrun, that we’ve discovered that vaccinations are unsafe, that we’re standing up against Sharia Law, we’re preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon, prices are coming down (or soon will be), Trump is an honest and effective servant of the American people and that the U.S. is once again respected on the world stage.

We live in a country where tens of millions of idiots believe every word of this.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

I met a guy today from a rural part of Central England–“nothing but farms and pubs,” as he put it.  His father was an epidemiologist working for the United Nations, and so, as a boy, he lived all over the world and grew up largely in developing countries that suffered from horrific diseases.

He and his wife had the conversation one would expect from such people:

  • Why are we so content to ignore climate change that is ruining our planet?
  • Why are people so indifferent to the suffering of others?
  • How is it possible that billionaires expect to live well here on Earth while 99.9% of us are suffering with wildfires, devastating storms, blistering heat, losses of landmasses, and desertification?
  • At the end of the day, is money really that precious?

Obviously, not everyone thinks this way, but to be in something of a “lovefest” for just a few minutes was a great relief.

 

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

I may have mentioned that I’m lucky enough to be a part of a group of boyhood friends from our prep school in Philadelphia that meets monthly on Zoom.

Yesterday the question came up as to how our political beliefs are formed, and the group found my input somewhat shocking.

First, from what I can understand from neurologists, our brains are “wired” to function in certain ways.  Via some combination of genetics, epigenetics, and early experiences, we are incapable of looking at the world in a fundamentally different way than we do now. I am no more capable of being a Trump supporter than I am of starting as quarterback in the NFL or memorizing the first 22K digits of pi, the way certain savants can.

This is validated by studies showing that our political philosophies are shaped by the way our brains fire under certain circumstances.  When experimental subjects were hooked up to electronics that monitored their brain activities and were shown pictures that depict certain threats, the results from self-described “liberals” and “conservatives” differed considerably.  When shown photographs of kittens and mountain ranges, both groups processed those images in the same regions of the brain.  But when shown photographs of snakes and tarantulas, conservatives were far more likely to process these images through the amygdala, the “fight-or-flight,” or “reptile” brain that kicks in when we interpret something as a danger to our survival.

I’m not losing my mind about immigration into the U.S.; I’m unconvinced that hordes of immigrants from our south or the Muslims from the Mideast are destroying our nation.

Why is that?  My brain is wired to doubt it. For whatever reason, I’m more inclined to think that I’m one of 8 billion people on this planet that have almost identical goals and ideals.  We all want to survive, to love our children, to be productive and responsible human beings, and to appreciate beauty.

On top of that, I’m a follower of Sam Harris, neuroscientist, author, and philosopher, whose work has shown that free will is an illusion. He points to a study whose findings are that, when we make up our minds in an instant to do a certain thing, say lift our finger from a table at a certain point of our choice, that our brains have made that decision a full half-second before.

Needless to say, there is a ton more to understand here about Sam Harris and his work on this subject.  I urge readers to take that step forward.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

I’m not sure it’s as simple as this, insofar as Bush 41 and 43 weren’t criminal sociopaths.

I happened to be driving through Manhattan on the very day that Colin Powell was addressing the United Nations just a few miles away and claimed, and I think honestly, that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction,” and must be stopped by a U.S. military invasion.

Contrast that against what we’re doing in Iran.  Fifteen years ago, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), included Iran, the P5+1 nations (the United States, China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany), alongside the European Union made an agreement in which most of the developed world agreed that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon.

That stood firmly in place until Trump’s latest war crime, which is costing lives and choking the world economy, solely to defend our president’s neuroses.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The Brennan Center at NYU’s seminal report on this issue, The Truth About Voter Fraud, found that most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices. The report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent.

Does that stop liars like Mike Lee from spreading disinformation on the subject?  Of course not.

There is no judgement day.  There is no Saint Peter standing in front of the Pearly Gates discerning good from evil and acting according.

That’s a lucky break for Mike Lee.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

For most of our lives, many of us boomers have believed that the biggest threat to the United States was our president, starting with Tricky Dick Nixon, the inventor of the “trickle-down economics,” liar Ronald Reagan, and GW (the moron) Bush.

But yes, none of us was prepared for the cold, calculating criminal who is Donald Trump.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

It’s still possible that our most senior military leaders will insert themselves in time to prevent some truly catastrophic event here in the United States/abroad.

I keep thinking I’ll read about an exchange like this:

Trump: We’re invading Greenland.

Some four-star general: The f*** we are.

This may sound like a pipe dream, but these are people of real honor and integrity who take their oaths to our constitution quite seriously.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

The fact that human activity is unsustainable has been revealed to us gradually over the last century.  Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” was published 63 years ago.

That said, the ideas of climate change, ocean acidification, and loss of biodiversity have been essentially unchallenged by scientists for just the last couple of decades.

The only thing standing in the way of rapid environmental progress is greed, and in the end, that may prove to be an unbeatable foe.  Decarbonizing our grid and transportation sector will eventually destroy the fossil fuel industry, a group so powerful that it has a stranglehold, both on our lawmakers and on our corporate-owned media, that works so hard to misinform our citizenry.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Part of what is enabling Trump to get away with all the lies and criminality is that they never stop.  Not a single day passes without a revelation of some new outrage.

The American people are overwhelmed and unable to catch their breath.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

We need to keep a couple of things in perspective:

1) Humankind has experienced setbacks a great number of times, including the Dark Ages, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, totalitarianism, and the Nazis.

2) Where the cause of many of these tragedies is debatable, the MAGA movement was created by corruption, where a handful of billionaires and the media outlets they own filled unintelligent and meanspirited people with the BS they require to believe that the is government is coming for your guns, the nation falling into communism, vaccines are lethal, Trump is an honest and effective leader, the U.S. is respected abroad, climate change is a hoax, etc.

 

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