Our society lives with more or less constant reminders that fossil fuels, while extremely well suited to the 20th Century need to be phased out as quickly as feasible.
Some of these reminders are more spectacular than others, as shown in the video linked above.
This is in Ala-effing-bama??
We’re getting very near the end of this attack on American democracy.
From NBC News:
“All of them – all of them were telling us, ‘Trump sent us.” In harrowing, heart-wrenching testimony before a House select committee established to investigate the events of Jan. 6, U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino A. Gonell and his Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan Police Department colleagues described last week how those they witnessed violently breaching the Capitol explicitly pointed to then-President Donald Trump’s role in causing the insurrection. (more…)
Based on 142 interviews that C-Span conducted with U.S. historians in their periodic project to rank our presidents from best to worst, Trump came in fourth from last, as illustrated below.
Before continuing, let me admit that I know very little about the presidencies of James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce and Andrew Johnson, except that the last of the three made the American south a living hell for the recently freed slaves. What should have begun as a process toward equality, or at least some level of humanity, resulted in conditions that in many cases were worse than slavery itself, and led inexorably to Jim Crow laws, lynching, and the rest.
I’ll make an educated guess and suggest that Buchanan helped create the conditions under which the Civil War became inevitable.
Rep. Kinzinger makes an excellent point. The narrative that the insurrection was carried out by anyone other than Trump supporters is obvious nonsense, and his logic makes that all the more evident.
Every law-abiding American citizen believes it’s good that the House of Representatives has begun an investigation into the events leading up to and culminating on January 6th at the U.S. Capitol Building. But keep in mind that the FBI has been beating the snot out of this subject since long before the insurrection finally took place.
This has the potential to be absolutely stunning in its drama; in fact, it really can’t fail to turn out otherwise. I’m not sure what happened, but I’m fairly sure of what didn’t happen: one thousand crazed thugs with only a loose association with one another, inspired only by the conviction that the election had been stolen, and no coordination from anyone in government, stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election, in what was the most horrific display of domestic violence since the U.S. Civil War.
Shortly after the presidential election in November of 2020, most Republicans, as many as 75%, were convinced that Trump would have won had there not been massive voter fraud, even though no credible evidence showed that this was the case. A few interesting things seem to have happened since:
That number has steadily eroded. By the 24th of May, the figure was 53%. No data exists as to what it is today, but it must be falling, especially among those with college degrees. I draw that conclusion because the narrative gets almost no news coverage, even from the far right. (more…)
A climate denier I happen to know writes:
Senior energy analyst and political activist Glenn Doty writes:
U.S. Supreme Justice Thurgood Marshall left us with this: In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.
Perhaps it’s this failure to “recognize the humanity of our fellow beings” that lies at the core of what we’re getting so sorrowfully wrong at this point. (more…)
Climate deniers and renewable energy skeptics frequently point out that wind and solar have their own carbon footprints, and that these numbers are either totally unknown or astronomically high.
The first part of this is true, to be sure. There is no such thing as a free lunch, as people have been saying since the early 2oth Century, when saloons were offering customers free lunches, on the hope that they’d wash them down with a couple of beers at five cents each.
The second part of the claim is totally untrue. There have been dozens of extremely detailed studies conducted on the subject, as presented in this article by the good people at Yale Climate Connections. Natural gas carries a CO2-equivant number of about 30 times that of wind; coal is about 60 times, the combustion of which emits heavy metals and radioactive isotopes that are extremely toxic.
