I was so happy to come across this just now.
As I was cleaning up after my dog (pictured here) when he and I were out on a walk the other day, someone pointed out, “Not everyone does that.”
“So I note,” I smiled in reply.
To live as we think human beings should live is a marvelous victory.
Wow.
It’s also a sine qua non for a sustainable future.
Sure, New Zealand did very well in combating the coronavirus, while the United States, with 4.2% of the world’s population, has 28.5% of the fatalities. Putting this into focus, however, the Kiwis have three huge advantages.
1) Their prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has an honest concern for the well-being of her nation’s people, and does not make decisions based on protecting her own image and her prospects for re-election. Instead of delays out of fear of looking bad, shifting the blame to half a dozen others, and lying about the numbers, she jumped right on the problem while there was still time to prevent the disease from spreading like wildfire. (more…)
A group called “Republicans for the Rule of Law” has made a 49-second TV ad (see below), posing a question for the American people: Did you ever imagine the president could act like this? (more…)
Here’s a concept that suggests powering a lamp with a cylindrical piece of solar PV energy. If I were to take it into any fourth grade classroom in America and ask the kids for comments, I would hear three things:
1) Half of this points away from the sun! That’s stupid!
2) This thing is tiny. Solar panels need to be big enough to absorb lots of energy from the sun.
3) You need lights at night when the sun’s not shining. That means batteries, and they’re expensive.
Now, second graders aren’t going to be able to do that, so this narrows the demographics if the concept’s promoter is looking for investors.
Quick conversation between Glenn Doty and me re: the meme here:
Reader Ron Reasoner, ridiculing the idea shown here, writes, “A 30% increase in production raises a PV solar panels output from 15% efficiency to 19.5% efficiency. All that for double the price plus added installation costs.”
It’s actually worse than that. The idea that light reflected off any surface could cause anywhere near a 30% increase in efficiency is preposterous.
A fellow who is five years my senior at the Quaker-based independent school William Penn Charter in Philadelphia (pictured) went on to graduate from Princeton University. Because Quakers are pacifists and Princeton is such a venerable institution, when I reconnected with him on Facebook recently I had expected that he’d be sharing articles on world diplomacy, environmental stewardship, the inherent equality of all humankind, or perhaps the wisdom of Confucius. (more…)
The threat of an alien invasion has rightfully entertained the attention of all Earth people since the late 19th Century. And there have been certain times in the interim that it was the greatest putative threat against our population. Perhaps the mid-20th Century? Orson Wells?
Few people feel that way nowadays. Our sociopathic president, our escalation of the nuclear arms race, the prospect of world fascism, the concept of a planet so warm that it’s rife with superstorms, droughts, wildfires, loss of land mass, and famines–all these things seem so much more likely to take us down.
Aliens. Really?
Pictured here, Jonathan Metzl is a doctor and professor at Vanderbilt University. In his book Dying of Whiteness, he examines how it’s possible that the life expectancy for white males has fallen for three consecutive years–the first such instance since World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic. (more…)
