From this article:

“Passengers on each side of the canal that separates the port and city center can press a button to call the boat to their side. The boat charges while it waits at the dock, fits up to 12 passengers as well as bicycles, and takes less than 60 seconds to make the crossing…”

Once again we offer kudos to Norway.  With a little bit of luck, the United States will rejoin the rest of the developed world in its investment in cleantech infrastructure once the new presidential administration is in place.

 

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Here is a supposed man of God suggesting extrajudicial killing en masse.

I’m not a religious guy, and I don’t keep close tabs on what the fanatical so-called Christians are doing and saying, but this doesn’t strike me as something Jesus would recommend to his flock.

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I would add that voter turnout was based on removing a sociopath from the White House.  People who formerly cared less about politics than they did about NASCAR or professional wrestling came out of the woodwork to ensure the United States of America does not suffer another four years of embarrassment, degradation, and the erosion of rule of law.

In addition, I would argue that Biden actually was campaigning even though he didn’t appear to be doing so.  His strategy was to keep his mouth shut and let Eric’s dad make a complete jackass out of himself.  Worked fabulously.

 

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It’s painful living in America right now.

In a conversation I had with my father about 30 years ago, I said that I believed we are experiencing the end of the American Empire–not that this was an original idea.  I based my thinking mainly on the rise of China as an economic powerhouse, but, as it turns out, that was just the beginning.

What most people didn’t see at the time was the terrible consequences of gutting our educational system, the tax breaks for the super-rich resulting in the slow death of the middle class, the skyrocketing impact of big money on law-making, the rise in obesity caused by the decline in nutrition, the erosion of honesty in the body politic, and the abdication of the moral high-road, exemplified by our behavior on our southern border, pulling out of the Paris Accord, etc.

Stupid people (and aggressive lawyers) have brought us to who we are now, i.e., a nation that requires signs like the one shown here.

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In English, the modal verb “should” has two distinct, yet related, meanings.  When we want to say that someone has a moral obligation to do a certain thing, we say that he should do it.  But we say that exact same thing when we want to suggest that a person will experience a good result if he does a certain thing, e.g., “You should get a job in banking.”

It is for this reason that the title of the article Why Trump shouldn’t pardon himself is ambiguous–until one gets into the body of the piece.  As it turns out, the discussion is solely focused on the practical implications of this decision that the president, apparently, is free to make.

From the article: I have written all of this while ignoring what some will consider the more salient question of whether Trump pardoning himself is the morally appropriate course of action. This has been intentional.

Great reading.

 

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Here’s a quick discussion between life-long environmentalist Paul Scott and me, regarding the question posed at the left.

Paul: Short answer is no. You’ll probably be paying even less if you switch to solar or wind energy. (more…)

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From this:

A California Pastor has died of COVID-19, five weeks after his megachurch reopened in defiance of the state’s ban on indoor religious services. Bob Bryant, a 58-year-old associate pastor at the Water of Life Community Church in San Bernardino County, contracted the virus in November and eventually suffered severe pneumonia in his lungs…

To revel in the misery and ultimate death of another human being is a crass thing to do.  However, if someone has to suffer and die, it’s nice to know that it’s this boob, rather than some innocent person.

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Check out this short speech from the Secretary General of the United Nations, urging humankind to bring to a halt its war on nature before climate catastrophe becomes inevitable.  Powerful stuff.

 

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There’s a report being passed around social media to the effect that the cost of fires in wind turbines could be as high as $9 million.

Although I have no way to verify this, I can point out that there are about 60,000 utility-scale wind turbines in the U.S., and that they cost an average of about $4 million apiece to install, meaning that we have about $2.4 trillion invested.  $9 million represents 0.000375% of that total.

That percentage of the mass of my car is 4 grams.

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As baseballer/comedian Yogi Berra put it, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Yes, it’s tough, but let’s just try to extrapolate from where we are now, and take a guess as to what Trump’s popularity is going to look like in 2024.  We’ll do this by taking into account what effect the following vectors will have over the next four years:

• To start, Trump’s messy end-game here in 2020 will do nothing to endear him to Americans, and as awkward and revolting as it looks at this point, it can only get worse before it’s over. (more…)

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