If you’re trying to make sense of where the Russian invasion of Ukraine sits now, and where it’s headed, here’s part of a podcast in which public intellectual Sam Harris interviews political scientist Ian Bremmer.
Why was the defense of Ukraine so slow to begin?
credit: P. WOLMUTH/REPORT DIGITAL-REA/Redux
Apparently, the US House Oversight and Reform Committee is investigating the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long climate change disinformation campaign. Thus far, top executives from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell have testified concerning their roles. (more…)
From this:
Since 2021, more than a dozen Republican-controlled states have passed laws or approved executive branch policies that restrict how public school teachers can talk about race, gender and sexual orientation, as in the case of the bill critics call “don’t say gay,” which Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law last week. But now, even as National Library Week arrives this week, the attempt to limit what materials are available to young people is spilling out from the classroom into the library.
Florida seems to want to fashion itself after its neighbor Alabama, where ignorance is the coin of the realm.
Large demographic shifts don’t happen overnight, but if this becomes an entrenched trend that persists (and worsens) over a period of decades, we can expect Florida to have all the cultural and economic relevance of Mississippi (see photo).
From the Washington Post:
Here’s a good reminder of how criminally corrupt Trump and his entire administration was, and how astonishing it is that tens of millions of American voters simply couldn’t care less.
When you ponder the future of transportation, can you imagine most of it taking place above the ground? These folks say that passenger cars will soon be replaced by passenger drones, each flown by someone without so much as a pilot’s license.
If that makes sense to you, the company is raising investment capital. By all means, go for it.
You may be concerned, however, that 228 million licensed auto drivers may not be able to safely navigate our skies, that they will be constantly running into one another and colliding with the 115,000 daily commercial flights. You may worry that our FAA has a 0.000000000% chance of allowing this to occur, and thus, that these people are not really entrepreneurs, but rather, criminal frauds.
In that case, you’d be well advised to keep you money in your wallet.
A reader notes: Sarah Palin was the gateway drug to the crazy GOP. Here we go again!
Now that’s funny! “The gateway drug.” Wish I’d thought of that.
Think of what a different world we’ve have now had Sarah Palin not been on the scene. Obama would have lost, that’s almost a certainty. A McCain presidency wouldn’t have been an incubator for people mean (and stupid) enough to vote for Trump.
Hard to imagine.
Here are some interesting words from one Ralph Marston, and they echo what Abe Lincoln said, “We’re just about as happy as we make up our minds to be.”
Yet this has never seemed true to me. From where I sit, we don’t decide to be happy; in fact, we don’t really even think about it at all. I would say that happiness is a natural byproduct of honesty and good work, of taking good care of oneself and others.
Here’s an experiment that you can conduct to test this. Next time you’re out on the road, look for a few cars or trucks with stickers that read: MAGA, Trump 2024, Liberal Tears, Vaccinations Kill, or what have you, and look at the faces of the drivers. You’re likely to see some scowls, or other indications of some sort of “friction” in life. Then find a few electric vehicles, or cars with stickers that say things like “Co-Exist” or “I Support Science,” and notice faces of contentment and even conviviality.
This is why my reaction to the Trump supporters is just as much pity as anything. By and large, people who buy into all the hate and the lies are simply nasty, miserable human beings.
Here’s a product for sale that is completely illegal, in most if not all of our 50 states, it both blocks the driver’s vision and distracts him from his task.
I would hope that it’s illegal to sell a product that is illegal to use. If it isn’t, it should be.
In any case, there is a moral side of this story as well. You’re selling products that are bound to reduce the life expectancies of everyone riding in the cars in which they are installed. I’m not sure how impressed Saint Peter is going to be with your life’s work when you meet him at the Pearly Gates.
It certainly is remarkable that the bravery of Ukrainians of all ages isn’t inspiring us Americans to do a better job in defending our democracy.
Both in congress and in the electorate as a whole, there are far too many people who look at the January 6th insurrection as a non-event, i.e., “legitimate political discourse,” and see it as something that our nation simply needs to put behind us and forget. Many of them still believe that Trump won the election, and that the evidence of this has somehow not yet come forth.
It’s said that “you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” Let’s hope that’s not the case here.
