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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

It’s likely that we’ll never learn the truth here, but here are a few theories:

• Fox and/or its chairman Rupert Murdoch was angry that Carlson cost them $757.5 million in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case, and that they now face a much larger settlement to Smartmatic, on the precise same case elements.  This explanation seems unlikely, considering that Fox had, via Carlson and others, promoted the Big Lie from the start, right after the thumping that Trump took in the election, in an attempt to maintain its viewership base.  Millions of Americans were, and continue to be, hungry to receive that message, regardless of whether it’s true.

Enormous amounts of ad revenues hung in the balance.  If Fox admitted what they and the rest of the world knew to be the truth, i.e., that there was no evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, their viewers would have quickly jumped to Newsmax or OAN, “news” organizations that have even lower levels of integrity than Fox itself.  This story, of course, came straight from Murdoch’s under-oath deposition in the Dominion case.

• Carlson’s ouster was part of the settlement, the details of which are very unlikely ever to be revealed.

• Carlson left voluntarily so as to begin to distance himself and his $420 million net worth from the sinking ship that is Fox News.  That also seems unlikely, since the damage has been done. He can say that he used to be a professional liar (or that he used to “hate Donald Trump passionately”), but now he’s found Jesus, or whatever.  But what value could that possibly represent against future plaintiffs in defamation cases that focus on the lies he told before the day he was dismissed from Fox?

• There is scuttlebutt to the effect that Carlson’s genius-level capacity get away with these lies makes him a long-term liability to Fox, but this I find most preposterous of them all.  The entire right-wing “news” industry is based on deliberately misleading viewers with lies or other distortions.  In his former position, Carlson was no more egregious than anyone else; in fact, he’s more credible to my Fox-loving mom than Sean Hannity, whom she considers to be “over the top.”  Unless Fox plans to re-invent itself as an online shopping network or a cooking or sports channel, this makes no sense whatsoever.

Perhaps the answer to the mystery will reveal itself as Fox News continues to receive its ongoing legal pelting/public flogging of epic proportions.

I doubt it.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

A Republican reader and I were talking recently about Biden’s spending.  She was of the opinion that it was too large, but she couldn’t name what it covered. To be fair, I didn’t have a complete command of it myself.

I told her that ever since I was a child I couldn’t recall a single presidential administration that avoided criticism from its opponents for its lavish overspending.  The graph at left shows that the national debt has risen steadily regardless of which party is in office.  The only real difference is that Republicans like to spend on national defense, and Democrats favor social programs that are aimed at providing long-term value to our society via better education, universal healthcare, etc.

Here’s Biden’s budget for 2024.  Feel free to scan through the headers to get a general sense for the key issues that he and his people propose to address.  In addition to the traditional focus, there is special emphasis on infrastructure, which is normally construed to mean roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, railroads, but here is expanded to include clean energy and transportation.  He’s taking a position that Republicans find outrageous: that perhaps we should join our scientists and acknowledge the fact that our environment is in the process of collapse, and that the U.S. government should play a role in mitigating that catastrophe.

The budget supports itself by raising taxes on billionaires and corporations, and it accomplishes that, in the main, by closing loopholes.  Wealthy people’s income is essentially all capital gains, taxed at significantly lower rates than everyday Americans’ ordinary income; that difference goes away.  And rich people can afford top-level tax attorneys who know how to game the system on behalf of their clients who have no problem in shelling out thousands of dollars per hour for professionals at the very pinnacle of this (arguably criminal) artform. That vanishes with a mandatory minimum 25% tax on the income of the top 0.01%.

Maybe we should be asking ourselves where this all ends.  Some economists are unconcerned with our $30 trillion debt given its relation to our GDP per capita.  OK, but what happens when our GDP per capita starts to crash?  Keep in mind that this can happen in dozens of different ways.

Here’s one: Republican congresspeople, driven by billionaire donors, successfully convince American voters that climate and epidemiological scientists are frauds, and that, as a result, the United States becomes marginalized in world affairs?  Other developed countries’ policies will be based on fact, and ours will be rooted in the whim of our uber-rich.

So what happens then?  We will become a shambles. And, the saddest part of all, we will have gotten precisely what we so richly deserved.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

….And one of these exceptions is people whose thinking goes like this:

A) Tucker Carlson went on camera for more than two years and claimed, even though he knew it was 100% false, that the 2020 presidential election was rigged in favor of Joe Biden.

and

B) Tucker Carlson is an honest and reliable source of investment advice.

Sorry, but it’s absurd to have sympathy for people whose intelligence is that feeble.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Re: the graphic at left, Mike Tucker writes: Looks a lot like the red\blue maps you see around election time. Almost the same distribution too. What a coincidence?

It’s certainly close.

What is certain is that more guns per capita means more gun deaths per capita.  If more guns made us safer, we would be the safest country on Earth.  Instead:

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

What former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt says here is 100% correct.  What we failed to note, however, is that Rupert Murdoch’s net worth is north of $18 billion, and his team of professional liars are also extremely well paid for destroying their country.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Trump Rally (Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe)

In a recent post I presented the concept that there are, for all practical purposes, three distinct political philosophies existing in the U.S. right now: progressives, traditional Republicans, and Trumpists.

This is why the GOP is facing an uphill battle in 2024:

A majority of Americans, albeit a slim one, have liberal values, and

conservatives are split between those who are selfish and cruel, but by-and-large intelligent, and those who are hateful and stupid.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Here’s a video that presents an overview of the $757.5 million settlement reached by Dominion Voting Systems and Fox.

This is the first flake of snow of what is about to become a full-on avalanche.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

I wish people would stop calling it “hush money” and start referring to it as “falsifying business records.”

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

The meme here is a good representation of how stupid people sound when the “research” they have supposedly conducted runs counter to the findings of science.

It’s also a reminder that we live among people who honestly believe that American education is indistinguishable from propaganda, that our schools and colleges crank out socialists, and that our kids would have better, stronger minds if they simply skipped education altogether and entered the workforce at a young age.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

It seems that there are three distinct political philosophies existing in the U.S. right now:

Progressives, who are calling for the decarbonization of our transportation and energy sectors, simply because this is what our scientists are begging us to do, so as to avert catastrophe.

Traditional Republicans, whose values include small government and personal accountability.  They tend to be skeptical of climate science, even though they may understand that rising levels of CO2 are responsible for global warming. They’re likely to dismiss progressives as alarmists whose main motivation is dismantling American capitalism.

Trumpists, who take all this one step further.  They reject everything that runs counter to what they’re told by the former president, including the outright rejection of the scientific disciplines that affect public policy, e.g., climate and epidemiology. They support their beliefs with the fact that there are web sites that assert that the planet is actually cooling, that the pandemic is a government-driven hoax, etc., and that there are “news” channels that broadcast this disinformation.

As suggested by the drawing above, it’s this last group that causes most of the trouble that those of us in the other two parties face.  For instance, if  Trumpists didn’t exist, there would be near-unanimous demand for common sense gun laws, and we would put an end to most of the mass shootings that are robbing us of our loved ones.  This is especially upsetting in the case of our small children, whose bodies are blasted to bits because weapons of war are universally available, even to those who may be criminally insane.

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