Empathy and Happiness
Exactly. Being indifferent to the suffering of others makes it easy to keep a smile on your face.
Tagged with: Empathy and Happiness
Shall We Re-Write the U.S. Constitution Before the Midterms?
Insofar as the Constitution clearly assigns the states the responsibility to regulate and conduct elections, what Trump wants so desperately to do will require a significant re-write of the document that (most) Americans hold sacred.
The “Godless Left”
Maybe a single day will pass sometime in America’s future during which Trump or one of his moron cabinet members will refrain from making some idiotic remark like the one at left.
Our founding fathers couldn’t have been more clear that the United States was not established as a Christian nation. (See below.)
Respecting Geologic History
Until I came across this statement from Canadian-American theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss years ago, it hadn’t dawned on me that teaching children evangelical Christianity could be properly called “child abuse.”
I can tell you that I took some grief from certain family members when I didn’t send my young kids off to Sunday School. I explained that I wouldn’t have my son and daughter indoctrinated into a belief that is distinctly counter-scientific.
My family and I eventually mended the fences, but it was rough for a while.
If it makes you happy to tell your kids that, when they die, they will live up in heaven with grandma, that’s OK with me, since no one really knows what happens upon our demise. But there is something that’s particularly objectionable about explaining to young people that there were no dinosaurs, and that they must never trust scientists.
Owning the Libs, Punishing the Non-Whites
At left is another illustration of the fact the folks in the red states honestly don’t want education, wealth, healthcare, or any of the other things that are valued in the Northeast or the Pacific Coast.
If it punishes everyone but white, straight, Christian males, our nation’s tens of millions of hateful morons will open up their wallets and give you their last $2.
Homeschooling
Decent and intelligent people respect the rights of parents to homeschool their children, but there are two reasons for concern: a) socialization, failure to expose children to their peers, so that they may make friends and come to understand the norms of society, and b) the quality of the education itself.
Almost all homeschooling in the United States is conducted on the basis of a radical rightwing viewpoint, normally a blend of evangelical Christianity and Trumpism.
Tagged with: Homeschooling
Increasing Concentrations of Carbon Dioxide
These people (Big Oil PR teams?) write:
Celebrate the many benefits of increasing CO2! Deserts are shrinking. Forests are expanding. Increasing crop productivity is outpacing population growth. We love CO2 and so should you.
In truth, increasing levels of CO2 are not helping plants grow. Plants use as much carbon dioxide as they need, and no more. Similarly, healthy people do not benefit from higher concentrations of oxygen.
We live in world of misinformation, in which, if lies are repeated with enough frequency, they are accepted by the common American.
Tagged with: Increasing Concentrations of Carbon Dioxide
The Positive Effects We’ve Had on Others Are Profound, Whether We Know It or Not
There’s a theory that most people underestimate the positive effects they’ve had on other people.
Yes, that’s the theme of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but it’s also the core of the 1995 film “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” in which a music teacher who deemed that his life had been a failure because he never completed writing a great symphony, is gently and beautifully corrected. Please see below.
Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics
In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.
I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what he was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it and get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy than you added to it.”
“Exactly.”
I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.
He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”
Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.
“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.
“No. Not only would I not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”
—
I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.
Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.
What Canada Has that the U.S. Doesn’t
Until recently, I would have said: moose, maple syrup, and frozen tundra.
Now I would say: decency, honesty, and class.
