Happens to me every day multiple times.
1 Like
From that moment on, anyone who even contemplated voting for 45 should be ashamed of themselves. What more insight do you need to see what a sick, evil human this man is?
6 Likes
I donāt think that Prof. Hawkingās comments are helpful here. There is no real chance of our actions leading to a Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect. CO2 levels in our atmosphere were 5x greater than they are now about 100 million years ago. Indeed, levels havenāt been as low as they are today since the Karoo-Glaciation period about 300 million years ago.
While I am NOT dismissing the seriousness of rapid climate change, both for our civilization or the environment (both are under serious threat), there is no danger of a biosphere-eradicating runaway. In fact, it is more likely that we are slowing a longer term trend toward global glaciation.
Anyway, hyperbole like this only gives the deniers ammunition. I can already hear it. āIf Hawking can get it wrong, they why should we trust anyone?ā. Please stick to astrophysics Prof. Hawking.
2 Likes
Aldrin is a new drug thatās consumed on Wall Street when banksters want to get a quick buzz.
4 Likes
Sigh.
3 Likes
Continued resistance to the trumPP agenda must be maintained and donāt let fatigue set in. He and the rest are counting on that. Heās counting on people to become overwhelmed at his antics and counting on his capacity to wear down the resistance by sheer force. I would second what the always wise @mattinpa has said. Find the diversions that are close at hand, particularly those that will take you away from a screen for a while. We can also take comfort in reflections on the Obama presidency and what it meant to us, and not the attempts to undo it.
I personally believe he will be removed from office within two years or will resign when Mueller gets close enough to expose the corruption and fraud he brought to the office and patience is required before any of that happens. Weāll have a Veep we wonāt want, but heāll be permanently tainted with the stench and is not likely to be successful.
Find some good stuff near you, and open yourself to it, and know most everybody here feels about the same as you do.
9 Likes
Very well said.
4 Likes
Hawking is beyond brilliant and should be respected by all us mortals, but he might be a bit too optimistic about where we are in the āhuman extinctionā process. Itās already too late:
2 Likes
I forgot to mention that but itās huge. You can get a runaway emotional reaction reading disturbing news on the intertubes. Neil Postman was writing about this in the Eighties, arguing that even with the more-limited effect then of television and radio, the tendency it had was to make you see the worldās problems as out of control, and ourselves as helpless victims. But the fact is, the world in general has been moving, however slowly and fitfully, to address climate change. Maybe weāll go extinct in a century, and maybe weāll be OK, and maybe life will change. But if the U.S. government is AWOL for a time, the society isnāt, and other nations are stepping up. Thereās just no reason to panic or become despondent, and anything that makes you feel those ways might be something to throttle back on.
7 Likes
The best hope for the survival of the human race might be independent colonies in space.
I with the greatest of respect disagree. Our best, if not only realistic hope for survival, is to make it work here on Earth. That is where our focus must be.
8 Likes
I totally agree. I donāt do that anymore because I did it too much during Wās presidency.
I stepped back and learned to take a bigger view of things and youāre right. Modern life has comfort, safety and free time for just about the entire population to an extent that humans have never enjoyed before in any other epoch.
And Iāve gotten really good at not worrying about things I cannot affect. I recommend it to everyone - it takes practice, but itās great if you can learn. Get angry, get passionate - but there is no reason to spend every minute in despair over a Presidency.
7 Likes
Itās not the hippest quote I could mention but the Serenity Prayer isnāt a bad little guideline. If you can do something, do it, if you canāt, pfft, let it go. Iāll say that people who think itās trite and trivial havenāt tried it. Itās harder than it sounds.
5 Likes
Yes on both. Itās just been over exposed, but that doesnāt make it less profound. It is difficult. We humans like to think we control things. hahahahahaha The only thing we can control is our reactions to things and that isnāt easy - as you said. Itās damn difficult really - a nonstop learning experience.
2 Likes
My spouse, a political scientist, is good at giving me a more hopeful perspective.
The very short version: voters will, eventually, reject policies that go too far.
That may seem like little comfort right now. If I am guessing right, some of what weighs most heavily on you includes:
ā our country was robbed of what could have been the first Supreme Court in decades with a liberal majority
ā redistricting has turned the US House and many state legislatures into sadistic, racist beasts seeking vengeance for imagined wrongs
ā redistricting allows the GOP to control Congress and the White House without winning a plurality of votes
ā Trumppās administration is not just a reversal of where Obama was going (and a disappointing 180Āŗ turn from where we thought it would be going under President Clinton), but has brought us a government worse than we imagined weād ever see in the US in our lifetimes
ā GOP leaders donāt even seem uncomfortable enabling Trumpp and excusing him for the incompetence he brings to the job and the risks he creates for our country and the world. They even seem to enjoy the freedom to pursue their own agendas, knowing that Trumpp will ignore the legislative details and focus on what the leaders say about Trumpp on TV
ā America, many of us have been learning, is crueler, more misinformed, more racist, more bigoted, and more helpless than we imagined it was.
But, we live in a country where we can speak our minds and we can organize and we can vote ā and those rights give us the power to change things. I still despair over those who are hurt before policies are changed to something better, but it is healthier to be realistic about how things work.
For optimism, look at Kansas. The legislature that implemented the tax cuts that Brownback wanted has discarded his ideology in the face of real world evidence of slow economic growth and tremendous damage to education and other state services.
For optimism, look at California. The GOP Presidential candidate won California in every election from 1952 through 1988 with the exception of the 1964 run with Goldwater. The tax-cutting revolution probably began out here. Welfare āreformā did, too, I believe. So did exploitation of democracy to harm democracy ā legislation and ballot initiatives that used simple majority votes to impose super-majority requirements on passing budgets. The GOP then got the anti-immigrant ball rolling with Prop 187 in 1994, attacked affirmative action in 1996, and effectively ended bilingual education in 1998.
The voters were ramping up resistance as the GOP looked determined to barrel ahead with its message of greed and hatred. No GOP Presidential candidate won the state after 1988. No GOP candidate has been elected to the US Senate since 1988. Only one GOP governor (Schwarzenegger) has been elected since 1994, in a quirky recall election (which was enabled by massive fraudulent behavior by Enron and other energy ātradersā), and he opposed the GOPās bigotry-based policies. The Democrats currently hold every statewide seat and have a supermajority in the legislature. In 2016, California voters overturned that 1998 anti-bilingual proposition by a vote of 73.5% to 26.5%.
So, voters can make changes. We need to be realistic about what it takes, in terms of time and dissatisfaction, for the changes to happen. We donāt, and wonāt, accept the current situation. Resisting the current situation is not being unrealistic. In fact, the resistance is how we distinguish between acceptance of the situation and realistic acknowledgement of the situation.
Edited to add, in synergy with @mattinpaās advice: donāt watch TV news shows. At all. Donāt read online comments in places (like news websites) where trolls and assholes abound. It is not denial to avoid places that are unhealthy; it is sensible.
11 Likes
Maybe not about our country, but thereās much to cheer about our world, as there usually is once you look past the headlines, news blogs, etc. Unless I misunderstand him, Hawking is wrong about accelerating conflict, itās widely known that deaths to violent conflict have been on a downward trajectory for decades. Thereās much else to cheer: literacy is up up up, especially among girls, which is from whence our salvation as a global society will come. Renewably-produced electric power is now as cheap or cheaper than coal, even without subsidies, in most developed nations, and market growth of RE technologies is accelerating quickly. Deaths in childbirth, share of global population in extreme poverty, so many other bad things are down down down. Some tropical diseases, like Guinea worm disease, have been practically eliminated, saving millions of lives.
None of this was news to me but Nick Kristof summed it up rather nicely in the Times the other day:
Good News, Despite What Youāve Heard
8 Likes
I forget exactly where it is, but there is an area, I think in Spain, that has so many huge white greenhouses, they reflect the sun back and the temperature is actually 1 degree c. (I think, may be f.) lower than the surrounding area. Itās being studied in connection with climate change response.
1 Like
Steven Pinker wrote a book on the subject, āThe Better Angels of Our Nature,ā discussing these kinds of accomplishments. He argued that for all the death and war that we experienced in the 20th century, if you look at the historical record and the advancements in medicine and technology, humanity is slowly but surely becoming more peaceful and living better lives the world over. The news is sometimes creating a sense of despair in part because we are able to provide stories from around the world that previously we never would have heard. So even though we are hearing about more wars and epidemics than we might have learned about in previous eras, that isnāt because things are worse than they were back then, but simply because the world is a smaller place (in terms of travel and broadcast capabilities) and we are better able to discover stories about events.
3 Likes
Bingo. Add to the above the tendency of news stations to focus on the sensational, which is tragic/negative most of the time.
4 Likes
I donāt doubt heāll try ā and I await the righteous shitstorm that will rain down upon his orange pate if he does.
1 Like
Nice. Yes, the reason I refer to runaway GW is because as ice melts, earth absorbs more and more heat rather than reflecting it (ice is an excellent heat reflector) ā creating a feed-forward effect. The greenhouses you mention are a great example of additional things we might do to help mitigate.
2 Likes