The question posed at left by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is a good one: Can we summon the ingenuity and courage required to save us from environmental collapse?
FWIW, lots of smart people say no. Kurt Vonnegut, for example, predicted shortly before his death that this will be the first civilization in human history that didn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.
If you think there is a way to deal with people like Julie using reason and logic, you’re out of your mind.
Those who might believe the myth that the United States has become more respected internationally now that Donald Trump has regained the White House may want to take a look at this mural, recently completed on a building in the north of France, depicting Lady Liberty hiding her face in shame.
I was chatting with some Swedes the other day who told me that they have an ongoing rivalry with the Danes. When I expressed surprise, one asked me, “Don’t Americans feel competitive with Canada?”
I responded that I couldn’t speak for all Americans, but that most of us regard Canadians as intelligent, kind, and respectful people. Of course, now that we’ve seen fit to destroy a friendship that had been in place for more than 200 years, it’s hard to predict how they will come to see us going forward.
Now, if your plan is to rape and pillage American society to satisfy your greed, do exactly none of this.
Destroy everything in the government you can get your hands on, so as to create tax breaks for the billionaires. Demolish education, the environment, the justice system, emergency assistance, weather reporting, healthcare, and food programs for hungry children.
There is lot one could say about how revolting Hobby Lobby is, but a good place to start is that the Founding Fathers were adamant that the United States was not based on any religion.
In the words of John Adams: “The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
I happen to know the author of the piece at left from my business days.
Here are two related answers to his question:
1) The American flag has taken on a new meaning since the formation of the MAGA bunch, in particular, since the storming of the Capitol and the subsequent president pardoning of the hundreds of insurrectionists convicted in the attack.
Formerly, the flag meant pride in our nation generally, i.e., “Hooray for the United States, for the freedom it offers for its citizens and the good it does for all people around the world.” Now it often means, “Hooray for Trump and the modern Republican party, and screw the “radical Democrat left.”
Insofar as the flag itself can’t speak as to what its owner is trying to communicate, many people simply (and wisely) avoid the issue entirely and refuse to display the flag altogether.
2) Anyone who is unabashedly proud of what America has become under Trump has serious moral and/or intellectual defects. If you’re OK with broadspread racism, criminality, the rejection of science, cruelty, and the demolition of our relationships with former allies, you’re not a good person.
The words at left are a sickening reminder that there are still many millions of American idiots who believe that Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the U.S. medical establishment lied to them about COVID-19. After 50 years of faithful service to the American people, they think he made a U-turn and embarked on a mission to destroy the U.S. economy. Makes sense, right?
I guess they believe that Fauci’s counterpart in France lied to the French, his counterpart in Japan lied to the Japanese, etc.
I know plenty of dogs with far greater intelligence than this.
Some nations care about their future, and others simply don’t. That’s the only message that can possibly be taken away from what Denmark does to educate its young people.
Here in the United States, we have rich people getting richer, and everybody else suffering in ignorance and dead-end jobs.
In a matter of a couple of decades, there will be virtually zero new American doctors or other people of science. That’s because, while we’re very happy to teach our kids how to weld, grow crops, pay their rent and balance their checkbooks, this comes at the expense of higher math, biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering.
This photoshop of Mount Rushmore depicts some of our nation’s fathers in a kind of embarrassed disbelief as to what’s happened to our country. Of course there’s no way to know exactly how they would react to this criminal insanity, but I would suggest they would be goddamned mad.
