All this is true, but sadly, these people occupy important positions in our government, and their decisions have disastrous effects on many millions of people, and, at a certain level, everyone on Earth.
Their actions make the planet a more dangerous, unhealthy, unsustainable, dirty, cruel, hateful and ignorant place to live.
Who wouldn’t love to ignore their presence? Yet doing so only perpetuates the damage they do.
A new feature of Google Earth enables the user to compare Earth’s surface in 1984 to what it looks like today.
If you’re up for it, check out melting glaciers, disappearing forests, and land mass loss due to sea-level rise.
As recently as 60 years ago, it was largely assumed that humankind was incapable, except perhaps via nuclear holocaust, of doing any serious damage to our home planet. Today it’s right in our face.
I learned during a Zoom meeting yesterday that the acceptance rate at Ivy League schools is now 3 – 5% (i.e., the rejection rate is as high as 97%). When you subtract out those who are admitted merely because their daddy, e.g., Jared Kushner’s father, just donated a new gymnasium, the access to this level of quality education based on merit is close to zero. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist; it’s just extremely rare. (more…)
Televangelist Pat Robertson makes a somewhat controversial statement here, doesn’t he?
This is the level of thinking going on here in the good ol’ USA.
Re: the meme here, that’s part of the problem, to be sure.
But imagine that climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, and other breakdowns in our environment were happening, say, three times faster than they now are, and middle-aged people almost definitely would live to experience unprecedented levels of human suffering due to our greed and mismanagement.
Would we have a qualitatively different response? Perhaps, but I doubt it.
Here’s a reminder that predicting the future is impossible. That huge mainframe computer was the state of the art in IT just 70 years ago. What the fellow is saying turns out to be perfectly true, but the point here is how completely impossible it would have been for him to make that comment at the time.
Think of this next time you read an article that lays out where we’ll be in terms of transportation, nutrition, AI, environmental responsibility, space travel, world politics, jobs and careers, or literally anything else in 70 years. The only thing you need to know is that it’s almost certain to be laughably incorrect.
Given all the political entities in the Middle East associated with Syria: The al-Assad government, the rebels, the Russians, the Kurds, the Shia, the Sunnis, Iran, al-Qaeda, and the Turks, it’s a virtual certainty that if you pick an enemy to fight, there will be some significant way in which you’re actually, at the same time, fighting against an ally. (more…)
I found the meme here interesting, but I disagree. Speaking for myself, I think most people who know me would say that I’m a kind person, but it’s not because I’ve been wronged; in fact, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in 65+ years that I’ve been wronged in any significant way.
I believe that most kind people simply have a healthy awareness of and regard for the well-being of others. Perhaps we’re simply wired that way. (more…)
Not surprisingly, Santa Barbara is home to a group called Friends of Carl Jung. Famous for his theories of the collective unconscious, myth, and the archetypes they contain, Jung is among the most important supporters of the idea that we are all connected in ways that transcend our ability to perceive directly. (more…)
A friend sent me an anti-vaxxer piece today, marvelling at how “well-researched” it was. Yes, it comprised 20 pages of “facts” surrounding big pharma, falsified test results, how vaccines have resulted in disease and death, etc.
But where does all this data come from? (more…)
