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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

At left is the front page of the New York Post, one of Rupert Murdoch’s (formerly) Trump-friendly publications.

Now, of course, Trump’s reaction was predictable: The Post has joined the rest of the fake news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal (!) and Fox News (!!).

What’s yet to be seen, however, is the Trump base’s response to the fact that, one-by-one, even the most irresponsible of the ultra-right-wing rags are throwing the towel in on Trump.

Trump’s demise has been slow and steady; we haven’t seen a major explosion in the form of, say, an indictment out of Georgia, followed by federal charges from special counsel Jack Smith, who appears to be ramping up the pressure here.

All that could change any minute.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The reason we don’t tax religious institutions is not that they don’t make money, but because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that we don’t want “excessive entanglement” between the church and state.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Eventually, Fox News will offer some sort of mealy-mouthed apology for having knowingly lied to its millions of viewers about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.  (It certainly won’t resemble the one at left.)

When Newsmax realized that they were being sued for the exact same type of defamation, they stopped the lies on a dime, issued a fairly robust apology, and ran the other way like a dog with its tail between its legs.  The implication: We have no integrity whatsoever.  In fact, we’re professional liars, but not when it’s going to cost us billions of dollars in compensatory damages, not to mention punitive.  

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

In a recently post, Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News, I noted that the criterion that the plaintiff in this defamation suit must prove is “malice,” i.e., that Fox’s continual assertion, one that it knew to be a lie, is that Dominion rigged its voting machines in the 2020 presidential election to covertly “flip” votes that had legitimately been placed for Trump and record them for Biden.

I pointed out that it’s hard to imagine that broadcasting these lies doesn’t meet the level of malice, because of the extreme and deliberate damage they did to the reputation of every employee, and to the financial stature of Dominion.

What I later realized that convincing gullible but heavily armed people that their country’s democracy had been stolen deliberately incited violence.  It’s no secret that the MAGA crowd stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and that death and injury ensued.  Continuing to spew these lies could only have been calculated to cause more mayhem.

Here’s a question for the the U.S. federal government: Don’t you recognize, even vaguely, any responsibility to protect the lives of innocent Americans?  Can’t you stop these bastards?

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

From “Fox News Is in a World of Hurt“: When it comes to the burden in this case, it falls on Dominion to prove that Fox acted with actual malice when it claimed that Dominion’s voting machines were designed to rig elections. That burden is typically very difficult to meet, but how far does this filing (that Fox knew its claims were false) go towards meeting it?” (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking that occurs when people are processing and interpreting information in the world around them and affects the decisions and judgments that they make.

Because we’re not computers, we’re all victims of this phenomenon; we have emotions, personal agendas, limited attention spans, peer group pressures, life events that shape our beliefs, and so forth.  Yet some of these are more vicious and less defensible than others.

For example, Fox News has identified a demographic segment of the U.S. population that is especially susceptible to poor thinking, making it particularly vulnerable, and it’s taking full advantage of those weaknesses.

You and I, for example, may have trouble eliminating some our personal prejudices in our thinking.  However, we couldn’t, even we tried, believe the entire U.S. judicial system is corrupt and that it falsely upheld the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, where the true winner was Donald Trump.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Per this piece in the Washington Post, it’s now proven that Fox executives and on-camera actors knew the claims that Dominion had “flipped” votes from Trump to Biden were untrue — but “spread and endorsed” them anyway.  “There is NO evidence of fraud,” anchor Bret Baier wrote to one of his bosses.

But will this, the latest scandal at Fox “News,” have any lasting effect on the criminal organization and its viewers?

The lawsuits brought against Fox are in the billion-dollar range, but, even if successful, they will not bring the company and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch (net worth $18.6 billion), to their knees financially.

OK, but will the Fox audience react to having been the victim of a massive web of deceit?  Not in any significant manner.  These people are 100% convinced that the “radical left” is hellbent on implementing its “socialist agenda,” and regardless of how obviously fictitious it is, they will consume anything that supports this notion, as if it were oxygen.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

So many possibly interpretations here.

Someone mentioned musical performance.  As a wanna-be classical pianist, one of my downfalls was that I never had the discipline to take the piece’s most difficult passages and spend the necessary amount of time to break them down into their elements and practice them until they became, in fact, the most easily played parts.

Perhaps a more obvious application is politics. If we don’t repair an attempt to overthrow our government, guess what we’re going to repeat?

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

I like the artwork here.

Our country finds itself at a crossroads.  Failing to prosecute Trump for his treasonous attempt to overthrow our government will relegate us into the same category as the other dictatorships for which rule of law means nothing.

In the process of establishing this democracy, our founding fathers’ took incredible risks in the face of hanging, and (a quick note from history) once a democracy is gone, it’s almost impossible to get back.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

FWIW, a lifelong friend recently retired from his career as an Ob/Gyn.  He personally didn’t perform abortions, but worked in a hospital that houses an entire department dedicated to the practice.  He told me that the concept of aborting a viable fetus for any other reason than the saving life of the mother literally never happens anywhere in the United States.

I scratched out the vulgar “c” word at the bottom of the meme here, but trust me, I too have an extremely low opinion of people who spread lies designed to support their political views.

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