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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

My politically conservative, life-long Republican mom and I had a conversation last night that I thought I’d share.

Craig:  If you could receive a Christmas present in the form of a breakthrough in U.S. politics, what would that be?

Mom: Trump would announce that he’s not running, though I know this is impossible.

Craig: So whom would that leave?

Mom: DeSantis and Haley.

Craig:  Well, DeSantis is trailing badly, and one has to assume that his right-wing policies don’t appeal even to the GOP,  and would certainly not play well in the context of a general election.

Mom: What about Haley?

Craig: I have to admit that I admired her when she was a Democrat U.S. rep in Hawaii, but then she, perhaps along with her advisors, figured out that she could go further as a Republican.  In the blink of an eye, she went from, to take an example, claiming that abortion was a woman’s right to demanding that it be banned.  Maybe she had a personal epiphany on this and a dozen other hot-button subjects, but it seems more likely that she saw this as politically expedient.

I regard this is the same way as I would someone who told me that I could attain enormous power and wealth if were to write a book whose premise is that climate change is a hoax and that fossil fuels are the way of the future.  Not going to happen.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

In response to the reader who submitted the meme here, another fellow notes: (The existence of) God is an unfalsifiable proposition, meaning that science can’t say anything positive or negative about it. You’re welcome to believe whatever you want, but science and religion are non-overlapping domains, and I personally think it’s better for both if (we) keep them separate.

Good reply.  I would also add that most scientists are atheists, meaning that those whose life’s work is science itself refute the claim in the meme.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Young folks may not get the reference here, as the American sitcom “Gilligan’s Island” aired in the late 1960s.

This was a time before conspiracy theories and trickle-down economics.  When we had a problem, we didn’t ask Donald Trump or Ronald Reagan to fix it.

We were busy putting a man on the moon, and it never entered our minds to think that science wasn’t necessarily the best approach.

When it came to dealing with disease, we didn’t ingest bleach, insert high-intensity lights into our orifices, or prevent our governments from protecting its citizens with vaccines, social distancing, etc.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Perhaps America’s greatest news story right now is Trump’s attempt to have the Supreme Court rule that he is immune from criminal prosecution because he was president at the time he committed the alleged crimes.  Most of us view this as absurd, but let’s examine the subject more closely.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who was randomly assigned to the federal criminal case accusing Donald Trump of conspiring to illegally overturn the 2020 election, has ruled that “presidents are not kings,” and therefore Trump had no special privilege to commit crimes with impunity.

Now, special prosecutor Jack Smith has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to make a ruling here, even though such a request “leap-frogs” the case over an appellate court.

Former federal prosecutor and legal analysts Glenn Kirscher makes a point that, IMO, explains why Trump’s assertion is, in fact, absurd: If the Supreme Court agrees with Trump, they are making the statement that they are not a co-equal branch of government as specified in the U.S. Constitution.  If Trump were to be reelected, he could, if he wished, simply disband the high court.

This is the type of political criminality that defines so-called “banana republics,” i.e., these countries’ executives somehow attain absolute power, and then wield that power to pound their judiciaries and legislative bodies (not to mention political opponents) into insignificance. Regardless of how conservative the nine-judge panel may be, they will not vote to set aside the Constitution so as to catapult Donald Trump to a position of leadership enjoyed by Kim Jong Un and the world’s other sociopathic dictators.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

From a reader, apparently anxious to show off his ignorance of world affairs.

If we don’t support worldwide democracies against the aggression of authoritarian regimes, we’ll soon be fighting these fascists on our homeland.

If we won’t protect Americans’ intellectual property rights internationally, we’ll soon have no intellectual property that’s worth the paper it’s printed on.

Of course, by that time, if we don’t use our justice system to block Trump’s attempt to overthrow our government, we will have already become a fascist state, so maybe there’s no big deal to be made here.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

This from Richard Stengel, author, political analyst, and former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the Obama administration.

He’s right, of course.

What really matters, however, is that Trump’s base will never see this, and more to the point, would not agree with it even if they did.  When they hear Trump talk about “blood,” they read “white blood.”

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

I encourage readers to check out the “future of transportation” solution presented in this video.

These “trams” have rubber tires and therefore, can cruise around all over our 4.09 million miles of our roads, not bound to follow rail tracks.

The problem?  We have them now. They’re called “buses.”

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Quite a few of the people I grew up with in the suburbs of Philadelphia have turned out to be Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists; the meme here came from one of them.

I understand that there are distortions in the news we encounter, but I’m fairly certain that most of the central concepts are factual.  The world’s population faces existential threats in terms of viral pandemics and climate change.  There are ongoing areas of conflict between the Jewish and Muslim populations in the Middle East, which right now are causing grave human rights violations.  Donald Trump is facing 91 felony changes stemming from four criminal indictments, yet he’s leading in the polling to become the Republican nominee in the 2024 U.S. presidential race.

To believe otherwise is untenable, if only because of the incredible layers of improbabilities that would have to all come together.

Take the idea that COVID was planned by the U.S. government.  What about the other 200+ sovereign nations on Earth, each of which had its own COVID-related challenges to overcome?  Did South Korea and Australia and Norway say, “Let’s not respond to the pandemic, because of some folks in the United States with no scientific training are saying that the vaccinations are lethal and the case numbers are exaggerated by several orders of magnitude?”

No, they did not.

These folks can believe whatever they want, but they should not expect the population of intelligent and reasonable people to jump onboard with utter nonsense.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Here’s another reminder of how remarkable it is that Trump has any support from women at all.

It’s hard to imagine any self-respecting woman getting behind a candidate who has done so much damage to an entire gender.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

C.S. Lewis is remembered as a gifted writer who touched the hearts of young and old alike. To those of you who didn’t have the pleasure and honor of reading “The Chronicles of Narnia” with your child, only to have the both of you bawling like babies at the end, I’d have to say that you might have missed something.

More notably, however, Lewis is among a slim minority of intellectuals who migrated from atheism into Christianity, as opposed to the other way around.

The point he makes here is valid, to a point.  I’d have been more impressed had he mentioned that “the importance of Christianity” applies equally to that of Islam, Judaism, and the other hundreds of other religions that exist around the globe as we speak, and to the many thousands of others that existed since humankind came on the scene over the last 200,000 years.

No one seems to be too upset about the fates of Odin, Thor, Zeus, and the uncountable number of other celestial greats that now exist only in the vast god-graveyard, whose deification lies only in human fear and ignorance.

In any case, a great man was Lewis.

 

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