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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

A reader notes: Donald Trump just endorsed Viktor Orban. Orban is an anti-Semitic, racist, authoritarian despot who has crushed democratic institutions in Hungary, attacked the free press, and politicized rule of law. No wonder Trump likes him.

All our lives we’ve heard the word “unAmerican.” It’s normally used to say that something is unfair or unjust, that it violates our core sensibilities with respect to what is right or wrong.

We find ourselves at a crossroads.  We need to decide if the concept of being an “American” in this sense is something we value, or do we want to cross a line and become an authoritarian nation like Turkey.

Before we make up our minds, we need to consider that such steps are very hard to retake. Once things like a free press and free speech are taken away, they almost never return.

If, in 2015, you had wanted to bet me that I would be writing these words in 2022, exhorting this formerly great nation to pull itself back from the abyss of fascism, I would have given you odds of $1000 against a dime that you would be wrong.

Yet here we are.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

This stat on Republican scientists sounds about right, but that’s simply a result of the movement of the GOP to the ultra-right and its present-day radical anti-science position.

Go back 70 years and look at the demographics at that time.  I can’t find any studies on this, but let’s use common sense.  Remember the Cold War and the rational discussion that surrounded it?

Our respect for science was high, and our political ideologies played a far more  subservient role.

In some respects, the grand old days.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The investigation into January 6th is representative of what constitutes the Republican party today: a small group of horrible people at the top, and a limitless mob of hateful idiots at the bottom.

From a legal perspective, the mob is obviously the easier target, insofar as there are thousands of photographs and videos that show these folks in action, attacking the Capitol Police and smashing their way into and through the actual building.  The criminal courts are slowing processing them, and sending them to jail at the rate of perhaps one per week.

Getting at the top of the food-chain here is going to take more work, but the purging effect it will have on the country will be a thing of true beauty.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Fossil Fuels

Here’s a piece from The Economist that takes on the question: Now that we know how terrible coal is for the environment, why is it so devilishly difficult to remove?

Well, it’s economics, obviously, or it wouldn’t be covered in the august publication, but it’s complicated.  Rio Tinto became the first big miner to abandon coal, and its competitors followed suit.  But then, drama.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

The COVID-19 pandemic has morphed to the point where we have a fairly mild but extremely transmissible disease.

What’s next? No one knows. At least, that’s what my old school chum and now extremely senior epidemiologist Peter Spitzer, MD says.  We all hope that there are no further mutations, and this ends up being a permanent, though manageable part of public health, like the flu, though there is no hard data to establish this belief with any certainty.

One point of our consternation is the clogging of our hospitals, which are overflowing with unvaccinated slobs, which means that innocent, responsible people have to wait for critically needed services.  Can’t hospitals put a hard limit as to the percentage of ICU beds they will assign to these human swine?

Another worry is that mutations happen in countries with very low vaccination rates.  Although there is an argument to be made for vaccinating Americans first, this may be self-defeating in the long run.

In any case, my hat’s off to whoever made this fabulous book cover.

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

The point being made here may sound obvious to you, but that’s because you’re an educated person who understands a) this core tenet of public schooling, and b) that you’re not well equipped to craft school curricula.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Is there anyone so naive as to think that Joe Manchin feels the pinch from a mining union in West Virginia?

He has nothing but contempt for the people in the state he “represents,” and the money coming into him to stonewall the Build Back Better initiative puts thousands of time more pressure on him than any conceivable influence from some pathetic mining union.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The rhetorical question here is one that millions of Americans ask themselves on a regular basis.  Yes, Trump is a force for evil, so it’s only natural that good people would like to see him removed from the surface of the planet.

But compare the value of that to this chain of events:

Trump is fully exposed for what he is: a lying criminal conman.

He’s immediately and permanently expelled from the U.S. political scene.

He’s indicted on charges of election tampering, incitement to violence, perhaps even treason.

The legal proceedings drag on, but the entire world now has proof of what they suspected all along.

The majority of his erstwhile supporters realize and are forced to admit, if only to themselves, that they’ve been conned.

The U.S. has cured itself of a disease that at one point looked as though it might have been terminal. It’s as if a huge cancer tumor has miraculously been surgically removed from the middle of our nation’s chest.

Our country now has a new understanding of how it’s possible that a thoroughly corrupt human being can subvert American democracy for his own evil ends, and swears never to let anything like this from recurring.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Here’s a “survey” distributed on social media by an extreme right-wing political organization.  It’s funny how they use color to influence your vote.  As if there would be any validity to it in any case.

Of further note is the conflation between Trump and the Republicans. There are plenty of people, not that I admire them, who understand that the best-case scenario is that Trump quietly disappears, the GOP removes the lies and criminality, and returns to be the party of simple ignorance and cruelty.

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