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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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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

If you think that the future of transportation is personal airplanes, zipping about our skies, piloted by unlicensed, untrained people who are barely able to prevent their cars from mowing down pedestrians or crashing into other vehicles, here’s an investment you’ll want to jump into with both feet.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

I dispute both parts of the meme here.

Many people have said that reading the bible tends to turn people into liberal atheists, as rational people reject the idea of a cruel and vindictive God, and conclude that acceptance of His word requires us to suspend our capacity to think.

Further, though I admit that learned people tend to be liberals, there are plenty of folks across the educational spectrum who honestly care about the well-being of those around them.

The science surrounding this subject suggests that the liberal/conservative dichotomy lies in the way our brains are “wired,” and this does appear to explain at least in part why most people do not make radical changes to their political philosophies as they make their way through their lives.

But even if we accept this assertion that our brains are, in fact, wired a certain way, the question remains: how did they become so?  What part of this is genetics? Heredity?  Some notion of “basic personality” that transcends both genetics and heredity?

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

I just ran into a Norwegian couple here in the U.S. on vacation.  As previously mentioned, I like to compliment Scandinavians on their standing near the top of the World Happiness Rankings, and then ask them to explain how they got there.

These folks gave the usual answers: free healthcare and education, and a feeling of community.  But they went on to add something I hadn’t heard previously: safety.

No one endangered.  Because the rich aren’t super-rich and the poor aren’t dirt poor, there is very little crime, no gated communities, and a bare minimum of security.

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