In response to the meme at left, a reader notes:
Republican candidates in Texas: “I’m going to fix the mess the Democrats made” – who is more pathetic, those GOP conmen or the morons who keep voting them in?
This is an astute observation. There is always a market where supply and demand meet. It doesn’t matter if that market is a social evil like heroin (there are heroin dealers because there are heroin addicts), or a good one (there are excellent colleges because some parents are willing to pay a great deal to have their kids well educated).
As America descends ever further into ignorance, do not expect voters to have the epiphany to the effect that they’ve been lied to.
There is also a psychological effect at play here. As Carl Sagan said:
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
Historians point to Andrew Jackson, with his butchering of the Native Americans, to the presidents immediately before and after the U.S. Civil War, and to Warren Harding as the previous “worst presidents in our nation’s history.”
Having said that, regardless of what our country’s future turns out to be, it’s virtually impossible to imagine that Trump will not come out on the top of the list.
The meme here is a reminder that to call oneself a “conservative” used to mean something, other than the desire to conserve America’s racist and imperialistic heritage.
There have been conservatives all throughout U.S. history.
For some reason, our nation’s leaders at the turn of the 20th Century are probably the most notable, with TR and John Muir (national parks pioneer).
But skip ahead and you have those who have shaped environmental protection through science, advocacy, and media. Key figures include Jane Goodall (primatologist), David Attenborough (naturalist), Rachel Carson (author of Silent Spring), Steve Irwin (wildlife educator), climate advocate Bill McKibben, activist Naomi Klein, and Story of Stuff founder Annie Leonard.
Renewable Energy
The Constant Torrent of Disinformation Targeting Clean Transportation and Favoring Big Oil
Sadly, the world must deal with the cottage industry that has arisen to generation and publish malicious bullshit about electric transportation and clean energy more generally.
The efficiency of internal combustion engines is in the 20s, where the efficiency of charging batteries and discharging them through electric motors is in the high 80s. This is why we could replace every car and light-duty truck on Earth and with EV and experience an increased load on our grid of only about 14%.
The Constant Torrent of Disinformation Targeting Clean Transportation and Favoring Big Oil
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