All this may be true.  But does it matter?  Does the U.S. Justice Department have the integrity and courage to indict an extremely popular person, for the precise crime that you or I would be spending decades in prison if we had committed it? One has to hope so, especially since a run-of-the-mill FBI agent is spending 12 months behind bars for taking a  (single) classified document home.  When she was caught, she confessed and returned the document immediately.  She didn’t hide it, claim she had the right to have it, deny the charge, not did she claim that she was the ..read more

As we are all aware, there are critics of renewable energy whose arguments are that it’s expensive. The fellow photographed here is holding a 10MB hard drive from the 1960s. If IT hadn’t been taken forward and scaled, the date storage in your cell phone would now cost upwards of a trillion dollars. But, as we know, technology does march forward, and the best of it becomes part of our everyday lives. When it reaches scale, it costs an infinitesimally small fraction of what it did in its infancy ..read more

The idea that Trump supporters are members of a cult is not a new one.  The word “cult” denotes a group whose members have lost their capacity to think for themselves, and who have become slaves to a black-and-white reality in which the leader is always right, regardless of evidence to the contrary, and those who reject him are fools, or, more commonly, representatives of the dark side of evil. The author of four books on the subject who is interviewed in the video below is an expert in this space.  I use the word “expert” carefully, but who could be more qualified?  He was a Je ..read more

When my wife read my post from the other day on Ron DeSantis’s pledge to destroy leftism, she commented that the presidential candidate was referring to passing laws that would make certain acts illegal, not to changing human thinking and behavior. She has a point, but this is still not going to happen, because we live in a representative democracy, where we the people elect our lawmakers. If hateful morons happen to be a majority in Florida, that’s one thing; they deserve what they get.  But try to pass federal laws that ban abortion, destroy the environment, and teach creationism as sci ..read more

The answer is largely that the health insurance industry has an extremely powerful lobby that makes the idea of nationalized healthcare an impossibility. Of course, it doesn’t help that Americans are singular in their indifference to the well-being of their countrymen.  This has always been a feature of life here in the U.S., but Trumpism has taken it to a new level of selfishness and cruelty. If you ask Europeans if they think it’s acceptable to let people die of treatable diseases, they’d laugh in your face ..read more

What Pete Seeger says here is, of course, 100% true.  But just look around and see for yourself how far we are from any concept even remotely approaching his idea. We live with the fundamental rule that we, if we’re rich enough, can do essentially anything we like, regardless of its consequences to the planet. To take one of hundreds of examples, we’re belching out the toxins from the consumption of fossil fuels into our atmosphere a full 45 years after it was revealed to Big Oil that this practice was in the process of rendering the Earth uninhabitable. Activists care.  Proponents o ..read more

“The insult is likely a misspelling of the word ‘milquetoast,’ which is an adjective used to describe a feeble or meek person.” Is there any chance that this walking embarrassment to the United States will be forced out of the political spotlight ..read more

The gentleman shown here parading the Confederate flag through the U.S. Capitol has been ordered to report to prison to commence his three-year sentence. He has no worries if Trump or DeSantis is elected because he (and many hundreds of others) will receive presidential pardons. Republicans have no problem with violent attempts to overthrow the U.S. government–if it means keeping one of theirs in power ..read more

It probably hasn’t dawned on his followers, but “leftism” is a set of values shared by the majority of Americans.  Abortion rights, environmental responsibility, the application of the rule of law to all, equal opportunity, quality education, separation of church and state, even universal healthcare–these are all supported by most of us. Even if that were not the case, neither DeSantis nor anyone else can “destroy” these values.  Ask yourself is there is anything an American president could do to make you change your viewpoints on any of this stuff. An anyone could have predicted, th ..read more

Namibia is one of the poorest countries on Earth, with 20% of its population living on less than $2.15 per day. That’s why the sub-Sahara nation raised some eyebrows recently when it announced that it had signed an agreement to invest $10 billion into a plant that would create green hydrogen (generated by electrolyzing water with renewable energy) and export it to wealthier countries. There is little doubt that Namibia has close-to-ideal resources in terms of solar irradiation and high-velocity wind, as well as plenty of inexpensive real estate.  There is even less doubt that the 15,000 j ..read more