Decent and intelligent people respect the rights of parents to homeschool their children, but there are two reasons for concern: a) socialization, failure to expose children to their peers, so that they may make friends and come to understand the norms of society, and b) the quality of the education itself.
Almost all homeschooling in the United States is conducted on the basis of a radical rightwing viewpoint, normally a blend of evangelical Christianity and Trumpism.
These people (Big Oil PR teams?) write:
Celebrate the many benefits of increasing CO2! Deserts are shrinking. Forests are expanding. Increasing crop productivity is outpacing population growth. We love CO2 and so should you.
In truth, increasing levels of CO2 are not helping plants grow. Plants use as much carbon dioxide as they need, and no more. Similarly, healthy people do not benefit from higher concentrations of oxygen.
We live in world of misinformation, in which, if lies are repeated with enough frequency, they are accepted by the common American.
There’s a theory that most people underestimate the positive effects they’ve had on other people.
Yes, that’s the theme of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but it’s also the core of the 1995 film “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” in which a music teacher who deemed that his life had been a failure because he never completed writing a great symphony, is gently and beautifully corrected. Please see below.
In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.
I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what he was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it and get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy than you added to it.”
“Exactly.”
I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.
He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”
Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.
“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.
“No. Not only would I not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”
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I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.
Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.
Until recently, I would have said: moose, maple syrup, and frozen tundra.
Now I would say: decency, honesty, and class.
I’m ready to live in a country with zero hateful morons, if that counts.
As shown here, people have an infinite variety of ways to express their loathing of Trump.
My maternal grandfather was born in southeastern Pennsylvania in 1903 and told me when I was a boy that in the 1920s, times were so good that saloon owners would offer a free lunch, consisting of bread, cheese, and cold cuts. “Sure, they were hoping you’d buy a glass of beer, but they really didn’t mind if you didn’t and simply scarfed down a free sandwich.”
He went on to tell me that nowadays, there’s a popular slogan: There’s no such thing as a free lunch, “but believe me, there was at the time.”
From today’s perspective of greed and selfishness, this whole story sounds like a fairy tale. Corporations and the congresspeople they own want one thing: to suck the life out of us.
As a financially comfortable, educated, straight white male, one might think I’m impervious to any of Trump’s policies.
I have a weakness, however, and it’s one I share with virtually every other progressive on the planet–I care deeply for the well-being of other people. It disturbs me greatly to see other people suffer, especially when that suffering would be so easily avoided.
At left is a great example of a fallacy called a “false dichotomy.”
We all crave information that backs up what we already believe, and, in general, Trump supporters have this going on in spades.
When we think about it, isn’t it possible to both protect American citizens and respect the Constitutional rights of all people living here?
