Even though I’m not a Christian, I’m happy to celebrate the holiday season with the hope that I (and all of us) can be a bit more Christ-like in the coming year: more compassionate, supportive of the weak, and dedicated to a just and verdant world.
A reader sent me this and adds, “…but the global warming?”
I’m not sure cherry-picking one anomalous temperature reading at one point on the globe at one moment in time undermines a theory.
Maybe you see science differently than the rest of us.
At left, we see the way the conservative website “The Dispatch” describes itself.
All this shows is that they don’t know what the word “partisan” means, which is “a committed member of a political party or army.”
If you’re a conservative in the United States, that means you’re a Republican, or perhaps Libertarian.
But they know their audience can’t distinguish “partisan” from “slanted” or “biased.”
If I didn’t have a conscience and were starting over in business, I wouldn’t offer business consulting services to sophisticated clients in Fortune 100 tech giants like IBM and H-P; I’d target idiots.
Look at Donald Trump, extracting $99 from as many morons as possible, numbering in the tens of millions. He’ll make more money next week than I made in my entire lifetime.
Here’s a brief article explaining why CO2 emissions actually rose in 2022, and what’s being done to turn this around, based on taking more precise measurements.
From this:
A group of 40 House Democrats, led by Rep. David Cicilline (R.I.), introduced legislation on Thursday to bar former President Trump from holding future federal office under the 14th Amendment.
Section 3 of the amendment states that no one who previously took an oath to support the Constitution and engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” shall “hold any office, civil or military, under the United States.”
Cicilline said in a release announcing the legislation that Trump “very clearly” engaged in an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, with the intention of overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“You don’t get to lead a government you tried to destroy,” he said.
This is a truly terrible idea, for a broad number of reasons:
It won’t work, because it’s unconstitutional. Trump has not been convicted of participating in an insurrection. What’s “very clear” to someone may not be at all clear to a jury. The Constitution, in both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, commands that no one shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
This will (rightfully) be perceived as a political attack, and a supremely stupid one at that. It sounds more like something that would come from a Ron DeSantis or a Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Trump is already completely unelectable. His base is evaporating on its own. When an enemy is committing suicide, wisdom suggests shutting up and getting out of the way.
If we want to help move the process along, just arrest the bastard, and charge him with a full array of felonies. There is no way to be certain of this, but it appears that Special Counsel Jack Smith is fairly close to bringing this whole thing to a crashing finale.
The second richest man in the world has the same intellectual capacity and political sensibilities as Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Not sure this is what our troubled world needed just now.
Trump’s behavior is becoming even more erratic and unhinged than ever before, and his legal woes continue to intensify. At the same time, congresspeople who support the Big Lie have lost their election races, and the GOP mainstream wants nothing more to do with him.
This could be the end of this pathetic moment in U.S. history.
The other day, I had a lunch meeting with two folks from a start-up that distributes an array of eco-friendly products. As we were finishing up, one asked me, “Are you optimistic?”
I knew he wasn’t asking me about my general personality, but rather about my take on the probability that humankind can avert the catastrophic effects of climate change and other forms of environmental degradation.
I always answer questions like this in the affirmative.
I’m not in love with Gandhi’s argument at left. Just because a certain type of disaster has never happened in the past doesn’t mean that it won’t in the future.
But there is no reason to believe that the entire human race is just going to sit around and listen to the greenwashing of the fossil fuel industry while the planet slowly bakes.
As we make our way toward Christmas and some of us consider how we can refashion our lives so as to better conform with the teachings of Jesus, it’s worth noting what Harriet Beecher Stowe said here.
Unbridled capitalism has smashed its jackboots in the faces of the powerless. Thus our rising rates of homelessness, child hunger, incarceration, infant mortality, asylum seeking, and a huge population of terrified and desperate people living paycheck-to-paycheck.
The ways to help the weakest people on Earth are virtually endless, but I have chosen to support the Turimiquire Foundation. These folks help the poorest families in Eastern Venezuela control their fertility, educate their children, build community, and gain access to life-changing medical and humanitarian aid–and they do it by making sure that more than 96 cents out of every dollar donated goes directly to the service of those most in need.
From the ad at left: American energy independence needs coal power. Sign the petition to keep local coal plants open and protect our economy.
This was written to appeal to people who know absolutely nothing about our energy markets and the impact of coal consumption on our environment and the health of the human race in particular.
Of course, it makes the MAGA crowd ecstatic, as it simultaneously a) owns the libs, b) enables billionaires to become multibillionaires, and c) rejects science. It’s a win-win-win for the least educated people in our nation.
I sometimes wonder how I would feel if one of my children had made a career out of promoting cigarette smoking, selling heroin, or destroying our planet for profit. What if I had put all that effort into raising a kid, only to find that he had become one of the most disgusting people on Earth? Fortunately, I don’t have to deal with that moral catastrophe.
It’s hard not to feel sorry for the relatives of those with no ethical sensibilities whatsoever. “Oh, my kid? He lives in Greenwich, CT and runs a fossil fuel hedge fund. He’s taking a personal role in engineering the end days of human civilization, and living like royalty. I couldn’t be more proud.”
