Is It Actually Hard to Convince the MAGA Base of Trump’s Position on Drugs?
I doubt it.
If there’s any take-away from the last 10 years, it’s that these people are not psychologically capable of questioning anything that comes out of Trump’s mouth.
Tagged with: Is It Really Hard to Convince the MAGA Base?
Why Does JD Vance Want to Take Back All Chinese-Owned Land in the U.S.?
Probably because he knows that his base is so ignorant on this topic that they don’t know that China and its corporate interests own a negligible amount of our land.
Another thing to be said about Vance’s audience is that they are unlikely to ask themselves: How could the U.S. “take back” land that is legally owned by another party?
What Is Your Country Known For?
Throwing our 250-year-old democracy into the toilet.
Tagged with: 250-year-old democracy
Presidential Crimes Commission
At left is Eric Swalwell’s idea for preventing another Donald Trump.
While I grant that something needs to be done to combat Trump and any future sociopath in the White House, I’m not sure we need an extra contrivance, when we already have the 25th Amendment and the power of impeachment.
If we’re going to have a congress full of spineless sycophants, we’re screwed in any case.
Tagged with: Presidential Crimes Commission
Building Infrastructure Efficiently
Think of the efficiency associated with driving trucks around and picking up old toilets and sinks that last in homes for many decades, taking them to a facility where they are ground into small porcelain chips, ultimately shipping the chips to the people who mix the ingredients for the bedding of Germany’s 830,000 miles of roads.
It would be more cost-effective to shuttle rocks down from the moon.
Biodegradable Plastic
Building biodegradable plastic is tricky, because a plastic container can’t fall apart until it’s no longer needed to contain its contents. E,g., you don’t want a plastic milk bottle to last 500 years, but it needs to last at least a month.
The claim here is that bottles know “when they are no longer needed.”
Sounds a bit far-fetched.
Tagged with: biodegradable plastic
The Politics of Older People
This is funny, but there is a certain sadness to it as well, i.e., that old people tend to be Trump supporters.
It would be interesting to know why this is. Perhaps it has to do with having grown up in the times in which racism was completely acceptable, in fact, de rigueur. Maybe it has some connection with having grown up in the Depression.
Tagged with: The Politics of Older People
Anti-Vaxxers Are Now Denying Vaccinations to Their Pets
Until recently, Americans uniformly accepted the science behind vaccinating their dogs and cats against diseases like rabies that could potentially kill not only the pets themselves, but any of the people they bit or scratched.
That was before the Trump administration came along with its Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is known for his aggressively anti-science perspective on all this.
Here is the story in The New York Times, Vaccine Skepticism Comes for Pet Owners, Too, of a woman (pictured above), just four years out of vet school, who has a practice that is seriously threated by this kind of ignorance. From the article: “I actually had someone scream and yell at us and storm out because we required rabies vaccines for her cats,” Dr. McGuire said, adding that the owner had accused her of trying to “kill her cats with vaccines.”
How to Regard the Trump Presidency
To the reader who sent me this:
Really. Our president is a criminal sociopath who had his people storm the Capitol and came within an eyelash of overthrowing the U.S. government in 2021. He was charged with 91 felony counts across four different indictments handed down by grand juries but then used his power to make the most important ones disappear. I guess it could have been worse.
Seriously, this guy’s comment shows how deeply screwed our nation is.
Tagged with: How to Regard the Trump Presidency
Learning from Schopenhauer
19th Century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer certainly never won the “Mr. Popularity” prize for his dismal perspectives on human life. He’s probably best known for his views that intelligent people can never be happy, and that, in fact, the smarter a person is, the harder he needs to struggle to have friends and fit into the world around him.
At left, he says something that reminds us of my earlier post in which I suggested that people who our proud to be Americans, because of the accidental fact that they were born here and not Japan or Egypt, are not too bright.
IMO, we all have something important to learn from Schopenhauer, but I’m glad he wasn’t my father.
