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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics — No Comments ↓

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 of 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 — No Comments ↓

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 — No Comments ↓

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 — No Comments ↓

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 — No Comments ↓

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 — No Comments ↓

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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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics — No Comments ↓

Scottish philosopher David Hume said, “We always disbelieve the greater miracle.”

In the case of making sense of Donald Trump, we can believe that either:

a) Most of the United States and the rest of the world has some bizarre, neurotic hatred of the man, perhaps “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” that causes the press to fabricate unflattering numbers and other bits of information.

or

b) Trump is a pathological liar, a lifelong criminal, and complete failure as U.S. president.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics — No Comments ↓

In Russia, writing material that is critical of Putin gets you imprisoned or exiled.

Trump greatly admires Putin, and is envious of the power he wields over his people. Exactly how far Trump can go in that direction here in the U.S. remains to be seen, but clearly the freedom of the press is under a great deal of pressure at this point.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles — No Comments ↓

In the early days of the automobile, it was common for families to “take rides” together, perhaps on Sundays. for no other purpose than to see the countryside.  Now that the novelty of the car is far behind us, and especially with the price of gasoline, few people people do this today.

Hot-air ballooning, however, is another concept. I just met a guy who has given rides over 100,000 people over a 35-year period.  He finished 18th in a national competition for landing accuracy out of 650 contestants.

The fuel: propane–and not too much of it.  Almost all of the movement of the balloon is created by the wind.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability — No Comments ↓

As we all know, a great deal of what we see on social media is simply made up, but the meme here is spot on, as I know from personal experience.

I needed to rid our ranch of ground squirrels, because their holes represent a danger to the horses. I built and installed a couple of owl boxes as an adjunct to a few other steps, and within the few weeks, the problem had vanished.

A great many local farmers around here (central California) have gone in this direction as well.

 

 

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