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.
When my wife and I brought kids into this world in the 1990s, it seemed a reasonable thing to do. But that was before:
• The United States was on its way to becoming just one more authoritarian nation.
• Climate change was fully understood, and ignored by the U.S. government.
• The American educational system was under attack by the executive branch.
Under these conditions, young would-be parents have a great deal to think about before they pull the trigger.
If the future looks like the past, it’s very clear that our legacy for generations to come will feature overwhelming amounts of authoritarianism, greed, ignorance, racism, environmental collapse, perhaps along with nuclear conflagration.
Fortunately, as some brilliant mind put forward, “The future always looks like the past, until it looks like something else entirely.”
It’s possible that some combination of the impending disasters named above will cause humankind to have some sort of epiphany.
To be fair, the SCOTUS didn’t rule that the president is “above the law”; they ruled that the president can’t be prosecuted for something he did as an “official act.”
FWIW, this seems at least somewhat reasonable. Should Truman have been subject to prosecution for the first and only use of nuclear weaponry?
Now, Trump can and will claim that the most egregious crimes he committed, e.g., inciting an insurrection, stealing classified government documents and sharing them with people with no security clearances, etc., are all official acts.
Maybe this is why we have so much attention on Epstein; it will be hard, even for Trump, to represent statutory rape as an official act.
Part of the beauty of the societies of Scandinavia and most of the rest of the developed world is their understanding of the fact that a well educated populace tends to commit very few crimes. Sweden, for example, is closing some of its prisons because they don’t have a sufficient number of inmates to justify keeping them open.
We here in the United States understand this principle as well, but we just don’t seem to care. The building and running of prisons is a huge industry, and, at the same time, we’re hellbent on destroying public education.
Incarceration rates per 100,000 people:
United States: 716
Sweden: 96
Many of us can remember the early days of renewable energy, and our concern that resources like solar and wind were intermittent. Could such energy sources offer value even though they are not “baseload?”
Well, thirty years later grid operators have long since figured out how to integrate large amounts of solar and wind energy into the mix with no issues associated with reliability.
Moreover, homeowners with PV on their rooftops either have batteries for energy storage, or a grid connection, enabling them to have power 24/7.
One would have to think that this guy on Fox Business understands this, and that his reporting is counterfactual.
As the physician points out at left, changing the ingredients in Coca Cola may not be the boon for Americans’ health it’s represented to be.
Anyone who thinks that an ExxonMobil franchisee actually posted this sign is a fool. Big Oil’s only hope for extending its corrupt stream of wealth is via Trump’s policies, and his deceit, e.g., “Gas is under $2 / gallon.”
I’m what’s called a democratic socialist, or social democrat — two synonymous phrases. This means, in essence, that I hope the United States can join the rest of the developed world in extending certain benefits, like healthcare and education, to all our citizens, in the manner of most of Europe, Israel, Japan, and the rest.
Yet, to be honest, the meme here isn’t fair. Capitalism does have a real direction. It’s making rich people richer and poor people poorer, and it occurs at the expense of human welfare and ecology, along with complete indifference to the world’s burning around us.
There are lots of theories, some more plausible that others, that attempt to explain why humankind has failed to make contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.
I’ve heard something similar to the cartoon here: that when ETs fly past Earth they lock their doors.
