Do These Solar / Wind Streetlamps Actually Exist? No.
I would bet a dollar against a nickel that the meme here is clickbait, and that this absurdly expensive solar/wind solution exists nowhere on Earth.
Tagged with: Solar / Wind Streetlamps
Let’s Admire this Cool Author’s Sarcastic Wit
“Thoughts from Aisle Four” is a blog written by a woman who goes by “marlene k f,” and, as we can see at left, she has a sharp, sardonic wit.
The tragedy here is that there are tens of millions of Americans who simply can’t get the irony associated with a president who incited a huge insurrection, and now is augmenting our capital’s police force with our national guard, presumably for our safety.
Why U.S. Tourism Is Down
The meme here offers a suggestion, and I’m sure it’s at least partially right.
But let’s keep in mind that the United States has become a rogue nation more generally. Our president has threated to use military force as necessary to annex Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. At the same time, we’re:
• Destroying our citizens’ health with our war on vaccines.
• Preventing our Environmental Protection Agency from doing what its name suggests should be its mission, i.e., protecting our environment.
• Kicking 13.7 million people off healthcare so as to further enrich our billionaires.
• Destroying public education.
• Trying to eliminate any form of journalism that could be even remotely critical of the president.
Maybe the world’s people simply want to stay away from a country that’s clearly on its way to becoming an authoritarian state. Tourists aren’t flocking into North Korea either.
Tagged with: Why U.S. Tourism Is Down
Making America Great Again May Require Rethinking Certain Things
As suggested at left, many Americans have a bizarre set of expectations regarding what it takes to make our country great again.
Perhaps this is what has people around the world so perplexed about our situation here in the United States. What were we thinking when we:
Elected a convicted felon to the White House?
Banned controversial books in our schools?
Eliminated due process prior to deportations?
Appointed grossly unqualified people to positions of enormous power?
Defend Your Culture!
At left we see the messaging that is going out to recruit folks for ICE the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security.
Interesting use of language. What exactly does “Defend your culture!” mean?
I’m having trouble coming up with anything other than “Help us arrest and deport all non-white Christians in this country!”
Note what this isn’t, i.e., a call to round up convicted and dangerous criminals.
Tagged with: Defend Your Culture!
Teaching Sustainability
On social media we see lots of ideas like the one expressed at left. I reject most of them on the grounds that, for everything we add to high school curricula, we need to take something away, because there are only so many school-hours in a year.
There is nothing wrong with teaching young people how to grow corn, vote, or balance a checkbook, but when this idea is taken seriously and implemented, some course must disappear, and, for some reason, Algebra 2 normally winds up on the chopping black: logarithms and exponents, quadratic equations, functions, sequences and series, and an introduction to probability and statistics. If perpetuated, this means that, in a matter of a decade or two, there will be no more scientists produced in America, no engineers, no medical doctors, etc. Those who care for our nation’s future don’t want that.
The approach I favor is to integrate the relevant aspects of sustainability into existing courses on civics, biology, chemistry, physics, social studies, history, and so forth. In fact, if there is a theme to the books I’ve written, it’s been precisely this: addressing the subject from as many different disciplines as possible.
Here are a few examples of how this might work:
History: What did the founders of Western democracy, e.g., John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau say about our responsibilities to one another as participants in a res publica, i.e., our “republic?” Discussion point: We live around people who have no concept that they have duties to the society in which they live. Does that seem right to you? Why? Why not?
Social Studies: How are industrialized nations and the developing world treating the problems of climate change and other forms of environmental collapse? Discussion point: What’s fair here? If the first world caused the problem, shouldn’t we pay to repair it? Considering that we all share the same atmosphere, and that it’s being poisoned, does it really matter what’s fair?
Biology: What are the real problems associated with loss of biodiversity? Don’t we lose uncountable numbers of species to extinction every year, and hasn’t this been happening for hundreds of millions of years? What exactly are we losing? Discussion point: What do our scientists say about the pharmacological value of plants and animals living today that will be gone in the next 50 years? Would we prefer synthetic chemical agents from today’s pharma companies to natural remedies whose plants and animals that are going extinct?
Chemistry/Mathematics: The pH of our oceans is falling, i.e., they are becoming more acidic. The pH of our ocean waters has fallen in the last few decades from 8.2 to 8.1, or 1.2%. That, it would seem, is a very slow change, which would be true if pH were not a logarithmic quantity. In truth, the change from 8.2 to 8.1 is a loss of 26% of the H+ ions per liter that make up acidity. Worth noting: Ocean life is quite sensitive to these changes, and, if the pH hits 7.9, the only ocean animal species that will survive will be jellyfish. Discussion point: Over 3.3 billion of the Earth’s people rely on fish for at least 20% of their animal protein intake according to Nature. How can we help nature stop ocean acidification?
Physics: We hear that “greenhouse gases” are a blanket that inhibits our atmosphere’s capacity to re-release our sun’s radiant energy back into space. How exactly does this happen? Discussion point: What did James Clerk Maxwell predict about the electromagnetic nature of light based on his equations? How was this supported by the actual experiments of Heinrich Hertz?
All worth considering, IMHO. If anyone wants a speaker at his next schoolboard meeting, please let me know.
Tagged with: Teaching Sustainability
Aldous Huxley on the Costs of Ignoring Reality
It would be interesting to know if Aldous Huxley was referring to anything specific in mind when he wrote these words about a century ago.
At this point, they most certainly pertain to the state of environmental collapse that surrounds us. With each passing year, the concentrations of atmospheric CO2 rise, as do Earth’s temperatures. As a result, the costs of fixing all this goes through the roof–if doing so can be accomplished at all.
Tagged with: Aldous Huxley on the Costs of Ignoring Reality
From RFK — Sr.
From Robert F. Kennedy: Few will have the opportunity to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, they send forth a tiny ripple of hope and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
Great words from a humanitarian whose ideals have largely been lost on American society in today’s times. Even U.S. fallen soldiers are deemed to be “suckers and losers” by our current president.
The saddest part, of course, is that half of our country adores this. We have established entire “news” channels whose programming is carefully orchestrated to teach its adherents to ridicule those who are concerned about others’ wellbeing as “woke communists.”
On Gender
Good for Rebecca Helm, who created the meme here.
Below is a bit about the SRY gene that she mentions. It’s just a few lines long, but it’s sufficient to explain why homophobia is really for true morons. It makes no more sense than hating left-handers, or people with red hair.
Location:
The SRY gene resides on the Y chromosome, specifically in the sex-determining region Y.
Function:
It encodes a protein that acts as a transcription factor, meaning it regulates the activity of other genes.
Male Development:
SRY initiates a cascade of gene expression that ultimately leads to the development of testes in the embryo.
Female Development:
In the absence of SRY, the default pathway leads to the development of ovaries and other female characteristics.
Sex Reversal:
Mutations in the SRY gene can disrupt this process, leading to individuals with XY chromosomes developing as female or XX individuals developing as male, a phenomenon known as sex reversal.
America’s “Cult of Ignorance”
We really do have a weird phenomenon at work here in the United States.
America has entire “news” channels that operate solely to deliver misinformation to people who are desperate to confirm certain of their beliefs as true.
