I loved this quote when I first came upon it many years ago, long before COVID-19.
Now it has a much more powerful meaning that no one at the time would have considered possible, i.e., that more than 20% of Americans would refuse to get vaccinated and thus help bring the pandemic to a close, on the basis of their so-called “rights.”
It’s pathetic.
press conference to announce Green New Deal
Most people understand that the longer our civilization waits to address climate change in earnest, the more expensive it’s going to be. Moreover, the costs are not growing linearly, but exponentially.
However, there are several impediments:
• The private sector has little incentive to make this happen, because the incumbent industries, e.g., fossil fuels, are able to externalize the environmental costs. There is no tax on carbon that would serve to make clean technologies like renewable energy more competitive.
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As we know, it’s mainly the anti-vaxxers who are dropping like flies from COVID-19.
As indicted at left, there are a few other pieces of irony that work in our favor as well.
Funny.
That’s what the spokespeople for all dangerous cabals say.
How can something like this be explained?
Well, how many people in Canada and Cambodia think their governments are trying to enslave them?
The U.S. is the wealthiest country on Earth, and has all the access to vaccines it could possibly use. Unfortunately, it has also cornered the market on mean-spirited crackpots.
This is what Republican political thinking was like in the late 1950s. Now, it would be the platform of a progressive Democrat.
It suggests something that today would be subversive: that government has a responsibility to take care of its people. Now that sounds like it could have been written by Karl Marx.
These folks claim to have “re-imagined” the neighborhood EV and are looking for investors to get them into production. For those new to this industry, a NEV has a top speed of 25 MPH and is therefore intended to be sold to people with short commutes through dense traffic.
When I got into this field in 2008, these vehicles, then called LSEVs (low speed EVs) were a hot topic. A typical alt-car expo had five or ten such offerings–all in the prototype stage. To date, there have been, I’ll guess, a few hundred thousand actually sold in the U.S.
What the world found was that, outside of gated communities, there was no market for them. Almost all driving involves roads on which 25 MPV is not only inappropriate; it’s dangerous. There really are no “short commutes through uniformly dense traffic.” There is a hair’s breadth between the market for golf carts and that for full-speed automobiles.
I will be quite surprised if these people ever get into the manufacturing stage.
Obviously, the racist and xenophobic rants of people like Tucker Carlson and alleged child sex trafficker Matt Gaetz are aimed at a less intelligent audience than the American people as a whole, but really, how stupid do you have to be to believe some of this?
Popular today is “replacement theory,” the idea that American workers are being replaced by the hoards of migrants coming across the southern border. If they are lucky enough to get here, these folks running for their lives become our nannies, gardeners, restaurant dishwashers, strawberry pickers, and chicken processors. They’re the reason strawberries don’t cost $30 per pound, and there are virtually zero Americans who hold these positions.
And btw, does anyone think Carlson is stupid enough to believe this crap himself? That’s perhaps the most disgusting aspect of all this; it’s showmanship.
A reader sent this to me, apparently as an example of how oppressive various secret governments and private organizations are.
There is not a “frequency of music.” On a standard 88-key piano, for instance, there are frequencies (called “pitches“) that range from 21.5 to 4186 Hz.
From Wikipedia: Johann Heinrich Scheibler recommended 440 Hz as a standard for the A above middle C (A440 ) in 1834 after inventing the “tonometer” to measure pitch, and it was approved by the Society of German Natural Scientists and Physicians the same year.
I publish this to illustrate that people who are completely ignorant in a certain subject can come to believe the most preposterous bull**** imaginable and use it to frighten and confuse others.
Note also what a horrible condemnation this is on our society. 50 years ago we still taught music in our schools, and this level of ignorance did not exist.
Here’s yet one more example of cooperation in nature.
From the BBC: Ants communicate using signals with their legs and use their antennae to sense different chemicals that other ants lay on the ground called pheromones.
How they do a certain thing, however, is less important than why they do it.
One thing for sure: in the ant world, there is no such thing as greed. If a bunch of people were trying to accomplish something like this (on a human-sized scale), we’d experience all types of problems associated with certain people wanting more than their share.
If the response to COVID has shown us anything, it’s that greed and selfishness dominate the American society. You and I live among pigs, and there has never been a moment in history in which this was more apparent.
