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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

I had a conversation earlier today with a woman from Melbourne, Australia who lamented that her country recently ceased providing free education to all her country’s citizens.

“It’s a shame,” she said, “that we couldn’t have followed the developed countries around the world that make that investment. Most folks don’t want to live around ignorant people.  Also, an educated population does better in the workplace, and that lifts their nation’s place in the global competitive market.”

All of this is absolutely true.  So why is the United Stated systematically destroying its public education system, while it remains a million miles  away from offering its citizens free college?  Well, there are problems that educated people pose to the billionaire class, one of which is that they are capable of critical thinking, which means they can see how thoroughly they are screwed by unbridled capitalism.   Another is that they are unwilling to elect sociopathic criminals to lead them.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

The video here has been around for several years, and provides a metaphorical look at the concept of privilege.

In this regard, we all have our own stories to tell.  Here’s mine:

I was adopted by two sane and productive white people who sacrificed greatly to put my brother and me through private school, college and grad school.  First and most obviously, because I was an unwanted pregnancy, I could have been aborted, and I’ll never know why I wasn’t.

But more to the point, I could have just as easily been adopted by people who simply didn’t value education, or honesty, or any of the other virtues that surrounded me as a child.

My aging mother knows that she’s not going to be around forever, and so our conversations tend to become more philosophical and personal as time passes.  Recently I brought up this topic, i.e., my profound luck, and she said, “Oh Craig, you would have shone in any circumstances.

I had to smile.  This is what mothers do.  They find reasons to stay behind their children in all cases, even where, in fact, there are no facts to support what they’re saying.  To mothers everywhere!

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

The meme here presents a grossly stupid and unfair comparison.

A diet that consists of too much snack food hurts one person: you.

The beef industry, by contrast, exists by 1) destroying vast areas of rainforest that formerly was absorbing CO2 out of the atmosphere, and 2) murdering approximately 300 million cows per year (9.52 per second), most of which lived in inhumane conditions (factory farms), and all of which were capable of feeling pain and distress.

That causes agony that far transcends you and your life of Pepsi and Doritos.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

To me, the funniest part (if there is one) of the fiasco we Americans are experiencing is that somehow, voters elected a president who has no training in economics to make decisions that are having enormously destructive effects on the U.S. economy.

Keep in mind that we’ve had presidents in the past who weren’t exactly rocket scientists; take George W. Bush for example.  But he was smart enough to leave policy-making on subjects like this to people who actually knew what they were talking about.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

U.S. child labor laws were put into place in 1938 to protect the educational opportunities of youth and prohibit their employment in jobs that are detrimental to their health and safety. But, as shown at left, today’s mass deportation of immigrants under the Trump administration has put pressure on businesses to find new sources of unskilled labor, and children are the natural target.

It’s hard to think of a single element of life for the common American that isn’t worsening by the day by Trump and his policies.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

When I was growing up in the 1960s, Republicans tended to be conservatives in some legitimate sense of the word. Their values, e.g., honesty, were written into each episode of television shows like Leave It to Beaver and the Andy Griffith Show.

Today’s Republicans are Trump supporters, and their values are as depraved as the president himself.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

American exceptionalism is a lowbrow concept, to be sure.

There are no special rules that apply to the U.S. that don’t apply to the other nations of the world.  In particular, it’s hard to imagine that God blesses America any more than He does Japan, Spain, or Bolivia.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

What Robert Reich says here is 100% correct; Trump can disappear me–or anyone else who published unflattering material on the president.

This, of course, is a direct violation of the principle that lies at the very core of American society, i.e., the free expression that is contained in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

It’s time for our judiciary to hold Trump and his team accountable for defying court orders.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

And Hegseth’s not just any news anchor; he was on Fox News, a media source that trades in half-truths and lies.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

In my recent post What Makes a Liberal?, I mentioned that most people do not make radical changes to their political philosophies as they make their way through their lives. There are, of course, widespread exceptions.

I’m reminded of an interview with a guy whose life’s work was executing criminals, via methods ranging from hanging to the arrangement of firing squads to the gas chamber to lethal injection to electrocution.  The interviewer asked which method he preferred, to which he immediately replied, “The chair. The lights simply go out.”

After many decades, though well before retirement age, he quit.  His reasoning?  “Life is precious,” he said.

Such a realization comes better late than never.

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