American entrepreneur and Trump apologist Vivek Ramaswamy is running for U.S. President in 2024.  Here’s his platform: 

1. God is real.
2. There are two genders.
3. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels.
4. Reverse racism is racism.
5. An open border is no border.
6. Parents determine the education of their children.
7. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.
8. Capitalism lifts people up from poverty.
9. There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four.
10. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.
If you like conservative platitudes, he’s your man.
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From Mary Trump, the former president’s niece.

I normally don’t do too much in the body-shaming arena, but I thought this was funny.

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While it’s true that most of the world is making only meager progress towards their climate/environment goals, certain localities are doing much better than others.

Here we see some of the improvements that Dusseldorf, Germany has made.

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My wife and I often have discussions around this point.  Why can’t people of kindness and decency speak as loudly as the greedy and the liars?

It’s simply not their nature.

Great thinkers have been saying this for thousands of years.  Fools tend to have loud mouths; wise people say little.

 

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An old friend is a big believer that the Earth has been visited by alien civilizations, and I’m flattered that he occasionally reaches out to me to get my perspective on articles like the one linked above.  I have two observations:

1) I have no way to authenticate the content of this or the hundreds of other papers that have been published on the subject over the past 75 years or so.  Especially in today’s world of disinformation, QAnon, etc., I’m suspicious.

2) Over the past 40 years, and especially the periods when I was an extremely frequent flier, I have asked, say, 50 gray-haired airplane pilots if they’d ever seen a UFO.  So far, I’ve gotten 49 “definitely nots” and 1 “I saw something I couldn’t explain, but I wouldn’t call it proof of an extraterrestrial aircraft.”

It’s interesting, and extremely sad, that humankind is just now arriving at the point where it’s starting to identify exoplanets that may support intelligent life–just when we’re baking our own planet, and destroying our civilization with hate and ignorance.

 

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The “Tea Party Patriots” say Justice Thomas needs our support now more than ever.
I guess I’m a bit muddled here; I struggle to understand how there possibly is anything “patriotic” about supporting a Supreme Court Justice who lied about the gifts he was receiving from someone who has business in front of the High Court.  That makes Thomas a common criminal, and I thought that patriots stood for rule of law.
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A critical part of American politics is the renaming of anything one side hates as “radical” and “extreme.”

Ask yourself about Biden’s “radical abortion agenda” and its “extremism.” What is it, exactly?  Well, I suppose it’s Roe v. Wade, which had been in place for 50 years until it was recently overturned.  It’s a woman’s right to choose an abortion in most circumstances, and it’s favored by the overwhelming majority of Americans.

Now, abortion opponents are attempting to use the 14th Amendment’s equal protection under law clause to protect human “life” from the moment of conception.  Now that may rightfully be called extreme, IMO.

In any case, propaganda is alive and well in 21st Century America; in fact, it thrives as our educational levels continue to deteriorate.  If garbage like the meme here is spread with enough ferocity, it becomes the truth.  God help us.

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Here’s a “patriot” who wants to sell you “Hold the Line” coins that can be given as gifts to soldiers, first responders, and others who “uphold our constitutional values” (whatever that means).

This may not be the only get-rich-quick scheme in the United States today, but no one has ever gone broke selling trinkets with blustery language on them to the MAGA crowd. And the business model here, selling an item that costs a few cents each to make for $9.97 apiece, sounds pretty robust.

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As you watch this video on a new design for the future of transportation, ask yourself if this is something that could conceivably meet the needs of our descendants.

I can’t tell you what the future looks like, but I’m pretty sure I can tell you what it doesn’t.

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Lots of jokes have been made about the passing of Pat Robertson, and the possibility that he’s burning in hell as God’s retribution for the televangelist’s having taken advantage of our nation’s poorest and most ignorant people on his rise to obscene levels of self-enrichment.

Here’s another good one.

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