How to Spot Idiots
Here’s a Was this a real address, or something mocked up as a scene in some sort of movie or TV show? It doesn’t matter. Highly recommended.
Tagged with: How to Spot Idiots
Trump Allegedly Broke the Law, But to Republicans, That’s Not the Point
The meme here doesn’t accurately reflect what most Republicans believe about how Trump is being handled by the U.S. justice system. If you tune in Fox News or Newsmax (not that I recommend this), you will be told, without any proof of course, that Biden has weaponized the DoJ against his political opponent.
You will “learn,” in other words, that not a single of the 91 charges against Trump in four indictments would have been brought against anyone else.
Now, you have to be frighteningly gullible to believe that. You have to want to believe that with every fiber of your being and be completely unable to examine the truth.
Start with the idea that the FBI could have caught you or me with boxes of classified documents in our homes, and that we would not have been immediately arrested. That’s the level of thinking going on here.
Yet this is the reality of where we’ve come, and how far we’ve descended in terms of evidence-based thinking.
Tagged with: Trump Broke the Law
Mr. Trash Wheel
Here’s a cool video on a water wheel-style boat that cruises around picking up trash, mostly plastic waste, from our harbors.
If this generates awareness of the problem, that’s great. But I’ve become convinced that the only real place to fight plastic pollution is upstream, i.e., reducing the amount of waste in the first place. To me, this means a blend of consumers’ refusing to purchase single-use plastics, and pressuring manufactures to quit this practice as well.
Tagged with: waste plastic
Idiots and Geniuses
I disagree. There are idiots all over the world who think they’re geniuses, and none of them is causing the least bit of harm to human civilization.
The problem here is that, for some reason, tens of millions of Americans can’t see that this man is a criminal sociopath, with no interest whatsoever in anything other than his own enrichment.
Tagged with: trump criminal sociopath
Banning “Woke” Terms
What are America’s priorities, and where does the banning of “woke” terms like “pregnant people” fit among them?
I guess that’s a function of where, geographically, you live in the U.S. The sensibilities of the people of the South don’t mesh too well with those in the more progressive, better-educated parts of the rest of the nation.
If you hail from places like New England, the mid-Atlantic states, or the west, it’s hard to imagine getting worked up about banning the use of gender pronouns when the planet is on fire, teachers are leaving the profession, and countries like Russia and Iran are threatening to transform half of the world into one big autocracy in a permanent state of war, conventional and perhaps nuclear.
How Biden Is Portrayed in the American Media
The woman who cuts my hair is one of tens of millions of Americans who believe that Joe Biden is senile, and thus unfit to be U.S. president. I run into this constantly, as there is an entire “news” industry that is in place largely to promote this notion, or whatever the MAGA crowd’s message of the month happens to be.
It seems to me that what viewers of programming at places like Fox News and Newsmax are seeing are clips taken out of context that make the president appear to be mentally incompetent. When he’s quoted by any of the world’s other journalistic organizations, he appears to do pretty well. He’s not Churchill or Obama, but he seems to get by fairly decently.
Since my mom watches Newsmax, I sometimes tune it in to see what’s it’s like. I happened to be watching it the other night just as they were introducing Biden’s speech on Israel, Hamas, Palestine, Russia, and Ukraine. I noted that they prepared the viewer to see a horror show, a bumbling old fool who can barely string together a few coherent words without losing his train of thought.
Less than three minutes into the speech, it was clear, even to them, they had gotten this entirely wrong. Again, Biden isn’t Ronald Reagan, but it was abundantly clear to everyone that he was doing a perfectly fine job. How did Newsmax address this debacle?
“We’re going to cut away from this speech at this point…..” — at which time, with no explanation, they went back to the talking heads discussing how none of the world’s military challenges would have happened if Donald Trump were president, and how he’s under attack by the Deep State, and his political opponents who have weaponized the Justice Department.
I roared in laughter, having witnessed with my own eyes and ears a “news” organization that has absolutely zero journalistic integrity. I may have been the only Newsmax viewer at the time who had this experience, and perhaps breaking down into tears at the pathetic state of the American news consumer would have been the more appropriate response.
It’s hard to believe we’ve sunk to this.
Tagged with: Deep State and a weaponized Justice Department
On the Death of Human Empathy
It’s no secret that Americans have reached a point where we can argue about anything, regardless of how seemingly noncontroversial.
Perhaps the reaction against wokeism is the perfect example. Evidently, about one-third of the U.S. electorate disputes the belief that all human beings are worth our concern, and have established an entire political movement accordingly.
At left we see what German-born American historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt had to say on the subject.
The beginning of the end?
Tagged with: Human Empathy
Take a Cool Guess—The Fun Quiz on Renewable Energy and Environmental Sustainability. Today’s Topic: Methane and Beef Farming
Question:
The Wall Street Journal Reports:
Livestock accounts for as much as a fifth of global emissions, mostly from cows. They burp methane, a greenhouse gas, and their pastures and feed can cause deforestation. Besides fossil fuels, few things do more to drive climate change.
Curbing emissions, is no piece of cake. Is farming covered by the Biden administration’s methane fee or by Europe’s emissions-trading system?
Answer: Can be found at Clean Energy Answers.
Relevance: Politics plays a key role in determining emission regulations.
These Are First World Problems
Here’s an article entitled: “Parents of San Diego Unified (the public school system in the southernmost city in the western U.S.) stress over school holiday schedules.”
It begins: “A lot of parents are stressing. What am I going to do about childcare,” said Jennifer Sumber.
First of all, the second sentence needs to be rewritten: “What am I going to do about childcare?” asked Jennifer Sumber.
Is that an important change? Of course not.
But how important is the reporting about the “stress” caused by any conceivable imposition made by a school system’s failing to coordinate its students’ Thanksgiving vacation schedules?
Let’s Be Honest About U.S. History
It’s fine to be a conservative economist like Thomas Sowell, but it would be even better if he didn’t make gross mistakes like this.
From the mid-1930s through the start of the 1980s, the U.S. public sector, with the help of high tax rates imposed on the very richest of Americans, helped build a well-educated and extremely prosperous middle class. This included not only white guys returning from the war, but also expanding opportunity for women, immigrants and nonwhite workers.
Sadly, this eventually gave way to Ronald Reagan and “trickle-down economics,” but the entire half-century event stands out in world history as a shining example of what government can do to enhance the lives of the better part of an entire population.
Tagged with: Honest about U.S. History
