This lady is a translator who was sitting there when she heard Trump say, “The United States and Italy have been allies since the days of ancient Rome.” And her face says it all. 
In January 2016, Trump held a televised “veterans’ fundraiser” that raised $2.8 million. The money was meant for veterans’ charities but was instead directed by his campaign and used to promote his political campaign. This was and is wacky, not to mention illegal….
On the surface, this idea has merit, and it’s been considered here in the U.S. for at least the last 20 years. It’s never gone anywhere, because of:
The extreme cost of replacing existing pipe, and
The fact that it’s limited to water that flows downhill because of gravity. (Obviously, if the water is pumped and you’re trying to extract some of its kinetic energy, you’re simply making the pumps work harder.)
It appears that Trump is running out of room in his claim that he didn’t participate in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking enterprise. Of course, what happens after all this comes out is hard to predict.
One of the things that is so shocking about Trump supporters is illustrated in the meme here, i.e., they don’t draw inferences about what happens outside of the United States.
COVID-19 was a good example. Many Trump supporters here in the States referred to it as the “plandemic,” meaning that they believed that our government made this happen, to test how far they could push the average American before he would refuse to follow orders.
I happen to know one of these people, and I asked him, “Well, you know that there are more that 200 sovereign nations on Earth, and every one of them took precautions to slow its spread. So are you telling me that each of these governments decided to do the exact same thing, to deliberately spread an often-lethal disease?”
It’s just a failure to think, especially in a manner that would inject doubt into a tightly held belief system.
As shown in this short video, Donald Trump says that climate change is the biggest con job ever perpetrated on Earth.
We are to believe that Trump a) understands the subject better than the thousands of our planet’s top scientists, located in countries all around the globe, and b) he’s telling the truth, where they have somehow gotten together and conspired to lie.
That’s quite a stretch.
I just got a chuckle that I thought I’d share. One of the Newsmax commentators was talking about “Bad Bunny,” the entertainer who the United States hasn’t been able to stop talking about for the last few months re: his scheduled Super Bowl appearance next February.
A spokesperson for the National Football League made a comment in defense of the decision to have Mr. Bunny perform, on the basis that it’s very important for them to appeal to a wide variety of audiences, and the commentator referred to this (and him) as “woke and weird.”
Suggestion to Newsmax: Ask the NFL guy to go on live camera, in your studio, and have your commentator tell him this to his face.
Advice to Newsmax: Have a couple of EMTs and an ambulance ready. If you think that “roughing the passer” is an issue in football, you haven’t seen anything yet; there will be little pieces of your talking head all over the room.
I’m by no means a man of violence, but I have to admit that I’d enjoy the spectacle.
I’m a bit unimpressed by the barrage of ads we see like this.
Are you 60 or 85? What type of cash-fueled lifestyle do you lead? How’s your health? How much income do you derive from your pension, portfolio, and Social Security? How much do you want to leave your kids?
When I was younger, ads like this would have been responded to with: “Leave me alone, fool.”
When 2GreenEnergy was launched in 2009, the concept shown at left, “solar thermal,” held great promise. The main reason for optimism lay in its integrated storage, i.e., molten salt, which could take on energy, raising its temperature, and then give it back, cooling off, as needed.
A friend, the late Bruce Allen, wrote a book on the subject that I helped promote.
The whole industry came to halt a few years ago when the levelized cost of energy, “LCOE,” i.e., the summation of the costs over the period of time that the system functions (the construction of the plant, operations and maintenance, the cost of fuel, and the decommissioning of the plant when its life ends) associated with solar PV and wind came crashing down. It didn’t help solar thermal that the price of silicon dropped by 80% in just a few years.
Another factor in the demise of solar thermal was the costs of thousands upon thousands of moving parts. If you look at the system shown here, each of these mirrors is constantly moving, tracking the (apparent) motion across the sky.
Speaking of moving parts, here is a story I like to tell that concerns another friend, this one still with us. John Perlin is a solar energy expert and author associated with UC Santa Barbara, known for his historical and future perspectives on solar power. He is the author of several books on solar energy and its history.
Among the dozens of other things he does on the campus, he conducts tours of the considerable PV arrays that one finds all over the dozens of UCSB’s parking garages. He told me with something of a grin that the only common complaint that people have when the tour is over is “That’s it? It just sits there? Nothing’s moving? Aren’t we talking about energy here? Where are the pounding pistons, the crashing waterfalls?”
He just shrugs his shoulders and thanks them for their kind attention.
Much has been written about the purpose and meaning of life.
The majority seems to think that human life has no external, a priori meaning, and that we confer meaning to our lives by the decisions we make. This, FWIW, is the core tenet of existentialism.
Kurt Vonnegut, true to form, takes a dissenting view.
Even those of us who detest Trump didn’t see this coming.
Withdrawing the United States from the global effort to prevent environmental collapse wasn’t bad enough.
