Coincidentally, quite a few of the people I grew up with in the suburbs of Philadelphia have turned out to be Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists; the meme here came from one of them.
I understand that there are distortions in the news we encounter, but I’m fairly certain that most of the central concepts are factual. The world’s population faces existential threats in terms of viral pandemics and climate change. There are ongoing areas of conflict between the Jewish and Muslim populations in the Middle East, which right now are causing grave human rights violations. Donald Trump is facing 91 felony changes stemming from four criminal indictments, yet he’s leading in the polling to become the Republican nominee in the 2024 U.S. presidential race.
To believe otherwise is untenable, if only because of the incredible layers of improbabilities that would have to all come together.
Take the idea that COVID was planned by the U.S. government. Oh really? What about the other 200+ sovereign nations on Earth, each of which had its own COVID-related challenges to overcome? Did South Korea and Australia and Norway say, “Oh hell, let’s just not respond to the pandemic, because of some folks in the United States with no scientific training are saying that the vaccinations are lethal and the case numbers are exaggerated by several orders of magnitude?”
No, they did not.
These folks can believe whatever they want, but they should not expect the population of intelligent and reasonable people to jump onboard with utter nonsense.
I saw an interview earlier today, in which a TV news journalist (I forget which one) predicted that the threat of communism is going to be the central theme of the Republican leading up to the midterm elections.
This makes sense, given that the target audience is largely unaware that:
In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy led this nation through a nightmarish effort to imprison anyone with any ties to communism. This is now regarded as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in U.S. history.
and
There are dozens of social democracies around the globe that offer the citizens extremely high qualities of life. The countries at the top of the World Happiness Rankings are, in order,
- Finland (Score: 7.764)
- Iceland (Score: 7.540)
- Denmark (Score: 7.539)
- Costa Rica (Score: 7.439)
- Sweden (Score: 7.255)
- Norway (Score: 7.242)
- The Netherlands (Score: 7.223)
Now, many MAGA folks can’t find Finland on a map of the world, but it’s that very level of ignorance that makes all this horsecrap work.
Trump is working hard to dismantling NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the largest collection of American scientists focusing on climate change. He proposed a budget cut of $1.7 billion, or about 27% for 2026. More to the point, he shut down NOAA’s website, that, formerly, gave everyone on Earth the ability to look at key climate-related data.
In response, those scientists, knowing that we can no longer trust the U.S. government for real climate science, have set up Climate.us.
More here, from NPR.
Looks great to me!
Here’s a short video that explains why we write.
Like the farmer planting to the seed, we do not know if it will grow into a life-giving plant, but we believe that it’s possible.
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