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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

When it comes to the way the U.S. covers the news, what precisely has changed over the years?

In a word, monetization.

Until the late 20th Century, news was a service, offered to the American people 30 minutes each day with little or no profit motive.  Now, it’s an extremely lucrative industry, fed by content carefully crafted to provide huge hits of dopamine into the brains of tens of millions of addicts, 24 hours a day.

Want to see Trump held accountable for trying to overthrow the U.S. government?  You’re not alone, and do we have something for you!

Believe Trump is being persecuted by the radical left that is ruining this country, led by the Biden crime family? Tune in to this crap over here!

Where there are large amounts of money to be made, only a fool thinks he’ll find any honesty and decency that remain intact.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

Here’s a review of the new book Children of a Modest Star that ponders the consequences of governance that would sit above the 206 sovereign nations when it comes to climate change mitigation and pandemic control.

There is no doubt that the status quo on Planet Earth, and a business-as-usual approach to global warming is getting us slowly nowhere.  The reasons for this are many, but, at the core, the politics of every country includes the notion: I will not take an action that benefits someone else at my expense.

Yet what would a unified world government look like?  Exactly what powers would it have? Can one imagine how most Americans would respond to being told what to do by an organization like the United Nations? And I’m not talking about our crackpot anti-vaxxers and climate deniers.  This is a big ask, even for sensible people.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

To reader Brian M. Stewart, the author of the post here:  Sorry, but I have terrible news.  Millionaires, and even low-level billionaires, don’t have access to the top-tier of judicial corruption.

Sure, wealthy people can afford attorneys who have been highly successful and are more likely than not to get you acquitted of whatever crime you may have been accused of, or get you off with a light sentence, if you hire them.

But if you want total immunity from criminal prosecution, you better be a Donald Trump

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

In the entirety of U.S. history, where does Goethe’s quote here best apply?

Most Americans would agree that it’s the behavior of Trump supporters post the 2020 election, their clinging to the baseless claim that the election was rigged, and the mindless hatred they feel for the rest of the country’s people as the “woke, radical left.”

Another solid answer is our population’s ignoring the challenges beset upon us by global warming.  As the late Kurt Vonnegut put it, when he saw what was happening shortly before his death, “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.”

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

As we can see here, Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus represented the concept that, for man to acquire the best for himself, he needed to be woke, i.e., concern for the well-being of others.

Only recently did the principle of indifference to the suffering of other people come into full bloom here in the United States.  Perhaps it can slip out through the same putrid crack in the wall it entered.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

One common trait among many of our civilization’s great thinkers is their humility.   Perhaps this started with Socrates and the line for which he’s so well known: “I know that I know nothing,” meaning that true wisdom is knowing you don’t know anything.

About 2000 years later, in the 1660s, we have this quote at left from Isaac Newton.

Of course, not all great minds through the ages were so modest.  Take, for example, the physicists of the late 19th Century who were convinced that everything of any real importance in their field had already been discovered.  A few years later we have Einstein, followed by quantum mechanics.  Oops!  That belief didn’t age well.

All this raises a series of unanswerable questions. Is there an end to physics, i.e. a point at which we honestly do have our arms wrapped around cosmology and all our puzzles have been solved: wormholes, time travel, dark energy and matter, string theory, unified field theory, parallel universes, another universe before the big bang?  If there is such an end, how close are we to it?

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Our local National Public Radio affiliate broadcasts a weekly radio program called “The Reluctant Therapist,” in which the host interviews experts on subjects related to mental health.  Today’s subject explored the difference, if one exists at all, between religion and spirituality.

To me, this comes down in large part to how one defines the words.  The broad sense of the word religion, as it applies to practices like Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Jainism, seems indistinguishable from spiritualism, in that adherents hold belief systems to the effect that there are dimensions to human conscious that transcend the mental and physical functions of our bodies.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The author of the meme here makes a great analogy.

Of course, disseminating the Big Lie, i.e., that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Donald Trump is far more difficult now that the right wing “news” media like Fox have learned that promoting this fabrication on the air can be extremely expensive.  The damages in the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News came to $787.5 million.

So, if Trump wants to continue the lie, he has to do it more or less on his own.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Photovoltaics

I grant that the concept here has merit, especially re: the use of otherwise useless land.  But bicycling under it doesn’t seem like a pleasant experience. And does the cyclist enter and exit?

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

In this short and extremely general video, a representative of ExxonMobil explains Direct Air Capture (DAC), a set of technologies that remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Anyone seeking to solve this problem needs to deal with the challenge that the concentration of carbon dioxide is extremely low, about 400 ppm or 0.04%, meaning that 99.96% is something else, mostly nitrogen.  Thus, the enterprise necessarily involves sucking massive volumes of air through a filter, a process that itself has a huge carbon footprint, looking for something that’s very scarce.  The concept is doomed to failure, and everyone, including Exxon, knows this.

If Exxon were honest, they would admit it, and attack the problem from another direction, i.e., transitioning away from the consumption of fossil fuels.  But we’re talking about the company that has known since the late 1970s that their products were slowly destroying our planet but conspired to withhold that information from the world’s people, including the scientists who may have been able to deal with climate change before its ruinous effects set in.

Today, Exxon is throwing out more red herrings (like DAC) so that it can continue to bake the Earth.  As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, “There are no words in the English language that describe acts like this.  The word ‘evil’ doesn’t even come close.”

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