When I wrote this about the meme here, “Yes. Bring back the conman,” a reader asks: Have YOU ever conned someone or misrepresented your intentions?
All this grabs the attention, but will anything come of it?
A reader sent me a roster of each of the 46 U.S. presidents and said, “Here’s a list of the presidents who were not criminally charged, let alone convicted and incarcerated.”
True, but Trump is the only one who attempted to overthrow the federal government of the United States. We’ll see if that isn’t worth something.
What Nobel laureate Robert Reich suggests here makes sense. But sadly, rationality plays a very limited role in the minds of West Virginia voters.
Yes, too many of them are ill and poor, and they travel around on infrastructure that resembles something out of the mid-20th Century. But here, their defining characteristic is that they suffered through a low-quality education, which is the linchpin that makes the election of people like Joe Manchin possible.
Here’s a Jeopardy-style answer/question for you. In the category Geoengineering:
It’s the percentage of the incoming solar radiation that we must reflect back into space in order to stop global warming dead in its tracks.
Correct response: What is 1%?
That sounds doable, doesn’t it? And it’s urgent too. Neither the private sector nor our world governments are making anywhere near adequate progress towards decarbonizing our grid-mix, and thus, with each passing year, we continue to experience the slow but certain increase in the frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters: floods/hurricanes, wildfires, and desertification/droughts, not to mention the loss of our land masses due to sea-level rise.
OK, so let’s look at another Jeopardy answer/question. Same category (more money):
It’s the number of different major modalities of geoengineering currently being investigated and computer-simulated by the world’s top atmospheric scientists.
Correct response: What is 6?
OK, but what exactly does that mean? Due to the limited understanding of geoengineering that most of us possess, when we think about the subject we tend to conjure images of shooting reflective particles high up into the stratosphere, but we are (rightfully) concerned about the unintended consequences, and we shudder to think about additional dangers imposed by the frailties of human judgment in a highly political and less-than-rational world: even if everything goes according to plan, who should control our planet’s thermostat?
Fortunately, one of the other five modalities takes a fundamentally different approach and poses no threat whatsoever in terms of possible unwanted outcomes.
It’s called “Tropical Cloud Generation,” and it carries with it additional benefits, including the virtual elimination of hurricanes and the nourishing of our oceans. I hope you’ll take a few moments to learn about it here, from the website linked above.
If you’d like to take an active role in moving this forward, or even if you’d simply like to gather more information, please let me know by leaving a comment, or hitting the “contact” button.
I look forward to hearing from you, as always.
Most of America agrees that Madison Cawthorn is a human disaster, but this article of the 14th Amendment cannot apply to someone merely accused of having participated in an insurrection. In fact, that would violate the 5th Amendment’s presumption of innocence.
Like it or not, we need to let the process roll forward. Eventually, we will have charges brought against Cawthorn and the rest of the top-level traitors who attempted to overthrow the United States government, and we’ll have convictions in place.
At that time, they will have far greater problems than being banned from holding public office. We will have colonized Neptune before they get out of prison.
The top 1% has proven itself amazingly effective in convincing working class Americans that their woes are rooted in things like loose border control, political correctness, big government, and the other boogeymen associated with the Democrats.
Guess what the rich think about the slogan: Tax The Rich. And give them credit for arranging the belief system of those in the lower half economically, who currently would no more approve of tax hikes for billionaires than they would elect Vladimir Lenin to the White House.
Moreover, addressing this misunderstanding is no easier than correcting wrong ideas in epidemiology, climate science, or any of the other subjects in which massive ignorance is so strongly entrenched.
This started to go the wrong way under Reagan, who lowered the top marginal tax rates from 70% to 28%, and paid for it by taxing the social security benefits that the working class had toiled its entire adult life to earn. Yet when he left office in 1989, the common American considered him a hero.
Wish I had better news for these people, and for our nation as a whole.
A significant portion of our society here in the United States has always reveled in ignorance; the current pro-Trump, anti-science, white power crowd didn’t just pop up out of the ground.
Maybe the only difference today is that this group attacks literally everything that makes good sense for our civilization.
Want pandemic control? “Hell no. We have rights. Masks don’t work. Vaccines are lethal.”
Want better education? “Hell no. Schools crank out liberals. Kids learn about LGBTQ and critical race theory.”
Here’s a new one. Want to electrify everything so as to phase out fossil fuels? “Hell no. Electricity will kill you.”
There isn’t a single element of progress that isn’t under rabid attack from today’s hateful morons.
Political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt gave us the words here.
In the context of the Holocaust, this makes perfect sense. We can say that the people who committed those atrocities failed to think of the consequences, and didn’t consider that sending millions of innocent people to agonizing deaths was wrong. In fact, one of the key architects of the genocide, Adolf Eichmann, used this (unsuccessfully) in his defense: essentially, “I wasn’t thinking.”
Having said that, there are many examples of evil that are perpetrated by people who clearly were thinking. When we say, for instance, “Exxon Knew,” we mean that a large team of senior executives in what is now the largest oil company on Earth was informed by the company’s own scientists that continued combustion of fossil fuels would soon warm the planet’s climate to the point that it would lose its capacity to support life as we have known it. They took that knowledge and conspired to keep it from us, bringing us now to the point that successful climate change mitigation may be impossible.
That may be a failure to think like a decent human being, but it’s certainly not a failure to think per se.
Ted Nordhaus is best known for his position that the environmentalism movement is doomed to failure, and that it should be extinguished, so as to allow pure market forces to come along and win the day.
Let’s begin by noting that, in his essay linked above, most of the points he makes are essentially correct. The burden of decarbonization does fall primarily on the poorest countries, those who benefit most from fossil fuels. The international agreements to reduce carbon emissions are (currently, at least) weak and unenforceable.
Having said that, what’s the alternative to hard work and the establishment of global cooperation? Nordhaus says it’s no problem; let’s just turn our civilization’s fate over to the rapacious greed of Big Oil.
If that sounds like a winner to you, I really don’t know what to say.
This is certainly very solid news.
