In today’s world of absurdities, it should come as no surprise that the MAGA “patriots” celebrate both the Confederacy and the Third Reich, both of which were beaten into submission by the armies that represented American democracy.
Have you noticed the plethora of start-ups in the clean tech space advertising on social media platforms to locate seed capital investors? If so, you probably have noticed two things:
The spokespeople for these budding enterprises speak completely understandable English, though through some heavy European accent. If you vant to make a fortoon, zees es yur beeg chance. Apparently, we think Europeans are less likely than Americans to rip us off.
Here’s Arthium, the very epitome. Chek zees oot. The technology itself would be laughed at by any high school science teacher.
Of course, most Americans have never heard of the French physicist Carnot, through whose principles we now understand that this idea is a total joke.
At this point, the United States places very little importance on education. Exactly why that is can be argued, but here are a few suggestions.
The benefits of an educated population reveal themselves over a period of decades. Similarly, the environmental damage caused by climate change occurs over long periods of time, and human beings (especially Americans) have extremely short time horizons that inform their thinking and decision-making.
The extreme right-wing believes that there is no value, perhaps even negative value, to education, insofar as it cranks out woke socialists.
It’s provable that educated people tend to be liberals. If you doubt this, look at the rankings of education by state to the results of the 2020 presidential election (see chart below) that Trump lost by 7 million votes.
It may be worthwhile to compare the U.S. to countries that provide free college education to anyone who wants it. The latter tend to be happier, healthier, and, perhaps most interesting of all, freer.
Here’s a clean energy investment opportunity that I don’t particularly recommend, for two main reasons:
Flywheels have been around for hundreds of years, and, actually represented a viable potential solution to our energy storage needs, until the cost of batteries came down and their energy/power density improved over the past decades.
I tend to be unimpressed with presentations that are largely about the problem to be solved, in this case, global warming, and only tangentially about the solution.
Kudos to the author of the meme here.
People have been lamenting the hypocrisy of Christians since long before I was on this planet. But the whole thing has got far more egregious in the last few years, as educational standards have fallen, the middle class has eroded, the working class has gotten angrier, the Republican party has squirted to the right, and social media has enabled the dissemination of misinformation and other truly horrible ideas.
When we were young, my brother I loved the made-for-children television drama “Superman,” the intro for which included the idea that our caped hero “stands for truth, justice, and the American way.”
It’s funny that, looking back on those days, nobody growing up us seemed to wonder what the phrase “the American way” actually meant. We all took it for granted that our country was the greatest on Earth, and thus, our “way” must be better and more righteous then anyone else’s.
This made eminent sense at the time–not only to us children, but to the “grown-ups” as well.
Shortly before we baby-boomers were born, our fathers had come home from World War II, having successfully saved human civilization from the scourge of fascism in Europe. Long before the conflict was over, and possibly before it had begun, it was clear that fascism, like a cancer, with its fearsome power to destroy life, would have metastasized if the United States hadn’t joined the international fight for democracy and basic human rights.
Post war, our nation eagerly entered into an era of prosperity that would springboard off the advancements of the Depression Era: the New Deal, Social Security, and Medicare, that held the potential not only to reduce poverty greatly, but, by setting the stage for numerous further advancements, e.g., the Equal Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, might enable the United States to lead the world into a new epoch of affluence and human decency.
On top of, within moments after the end of the war, the U.S. sign the bipartisan G.I. Bill, providing low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans to start a business or farm, one year of unemployment compensation, and dedicated payments of tuition and living expenses to attend high school, college, or vocational school.
We took all this to heights never seen in human history.
If you can stomach it, at the left is what “the American way” means today.
In an earlier post I raised the question as to how it’s possible that Republicans believe they can win in 2024 with a platform of inflicting as much pain as possible on everyone but wealthy straight white males.
For those who think the Democrats are bound to sweep, however, there’s a problem: the broadspread hatred of Biden based on the mischaracterization of him as an old, senile socialist. My mother detests Trump, but she is a life-long Republican, based on her conservative values and her disgust for Democrats generally. If the presidential election were held today between Biden and Trump, she’d be forced to vote for Trump, as loathsome a character as she finds him to be.
The same can be said for virtually all the tens of millions of other traditional Republicans who understand that Trump is a despicable human being: they could never, under any circumstances, bring themselves to vote for a Democrat.
Now, you might ask what the political upshot will be when Trump is indicted on some combination of seditious conspiracy, election tampering, and theft of classified government documents. The answer resides in whether or not it costs him the nomination. If it doesn’t, Trump is no more endangered as a candidate than he would be if his bust were carved into Mount Rushmore.
Thus we’re left at the same spot at which we’ve found ourselves for years: the imperative to get all eligible voters to register and show up at the polls. If we can do that effectively, no amount of unfounded rhetoric or voter suppression will return Trump to the White House.
This is hardly a new idea, but why aren’t these two despicable sub-humans concerning themselves with the fact that stupidity and cruelty aren’t going to work in a general election?
I’ll be the first to grant that there are many deep red states; i.e., our population of hateful morons extends well outside the state of Florida. But it seems obvious that the Republicans cannot win with a platform of inflicting as much pain as possible on everyone but wealthy white males.
“I think the evidence is clear. The president refused to lift a finger to send aid after he incited a violent rebellion against our republic,” “The president, therefore, betrayed his oath of office and betrayed his constitution of duty.”I
f you’re looking for a few minutes of amusement, tune in to Newsmax for a moment and watch them ridicule Fox News.
Fox recently discovered that spreading lies has the potential to turn into defamation lawsuits, and that these can be as expensive as hell. When they had that horrible realization, they got into a milder, less direct form of the disinformation business, and are now far more measured in the claims they make.
Newsmax seizes on this opportunity, like a hungry bear just out of hibernation goes after its first salmon. Most of their programming is shaming Fox for its abandonment of the principles of the ultra-right-wing: Trump is always right, the woke, godless left is a scourge to the nation, etc.
It’s worth a look. A brief one.
