When a Palace Becomes a Circus



I agree with my friend David Leebron, president of Rice University, who believes that social media represents a net negative for society.
Anti-vaxxers, climate deniers, and those who believe the Big Lie would be voiceless in such a world.

As I’ve mentioned frequently, meatless meat has gone mainstream. That’s because the plant-based burgers from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are virtually indistinguishable from beef, and represent an enormous step forward from the veggie burgers of the past. (more…)

That mean some sort of revenue-neutral tax on carbon, the best, IMO, is the Carbon Fee and Dividend.

FWIW, I have to admit that I have. American lawmakers are terrified of the gun lobby. The pressure it exerts on these slimy cowards is sufficient to frustrate the will of 90+% of the American people yesterday, today, and on into perpetuity.
I had a gun control sticker on my junior-size golf bag when I was 13. That was 1968.http://www.2greenenergy.com/2022/01/27/gun-violence-4/ (more…)

In reality, though significant voter fraud doesn’t exist and the borders aren’t open, encouraging everyone to vote actually does offer an advantage to the Democrats, because it is they who want to fashion government such that it provides real value to the common American.
If the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021 passes, it will force the Republicans to return to where they had been in the past, e.g., the Ronald Reagan days of the 1980s.
The reason that Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in a landslide (489 – 49 electoral votes, by a popular margin of 9.7%) is that voters believed in the overall platform of personal accountability, strong military, limited government, and trickle-down economics.
Now, one can debate the merit of this platform, but what matters is that voters believed that the GOP had something to offer them.
What does it have now, other than Trump, his criminal attempt to overthrow the U.S. government, and the congressional lackeys who still support him? Sure, we can throw in the anti-science rhetoric surrounding climate change mitigation and the response to COVID. But what all this has in common is a massive appeal to stupidity, which is what makes Trump a toss-up to win a second term in 2024.

Almost half the country believes that Trump is the best presidential choice in 2024.
About one-third believes that he won the 2020 election, which was stolen from him by a conspiracy that would have had to involve any hundreds of people who had no previous record of treason against the United States.
Also, about one in three Americans believes at least the complete untrue proposition re: COVID and its treatments.
This misinformation wasn’t sent from Mars by teletype or fax; it is manufactured right here on Earth, and distributed by “news” outlets like Fox.
A reader asks, “Does anyone believe that the facts revealed by the bipartisan J6 select committee reports, or stepped up indictments or prosecutions by DoJ or any number of states AGs will change things much by the midterm elections?”
What this does principally is reduces the amount of time that the user has to think things through before killing someone.
Think gun deaths in road rage situations were quick and easy before?

Rats. I was thinking we could simply make stuff up, like the stolen election or the lethality of COVID vaccines. This guy seems to be saying that this isn’t cool, and damn, just when I was almost getting used to it.