Going after the Right is a waste of time. It’s the Center that must be laid waste.
Category Archives: Thought for the Day
Thought for the Day: 24 March 2014
Driftglass on the occasion of Ted Cruz declaring his candidacy for President of the United States:
Life forms like Ted Cruz are the inevitable price the country is paying for the sin of Lee Atwater and the Southern Strategy — the day the GOP decided to go went all-in the crazies, and all the respectable people in town reacted by looking the other way and/or finding a hippie to punish. Of course, fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of raving idiots running the Party of Lincoln may speedily pass away.
But I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
The amount of time and money plutocrats have sunk into turning America’s yokels and snake handlers and dimwits and bigots into a Great Big Fucking Hammer has been mind-blowing, and what they have built with their money and influence is really a political engineering marvel: a self-contained, proudly ignorant, red-white-and-blue fascism, assembled right out in the open while being conspicuously ignored by virtually our entire elite American political media persons.
ADDENDUM: Read that 1961 article by Alan Westin, The John Birch Society
Thought for the Day: 18 March 2015
What amazes me about economists is their lack of curiousity. They have an amazingly interesting subject, a wealth of material to unearth, digest, analyse, a range of fascinating research in relate fields to draw upon and integrate into their field, and yet they seem largely content to sit around and play with theoretical models, occasionally testing them against some very restricted set of numbers. Climate scientists climb glaciers, take tree cores and lake sediment samples, painstakingly check changes in gauge locations and surroundings [Ed.: and build and launch Earth-observing satellites and digest volumes of data they generate]; physicists build colliders and measure the rotation of distant galaxies; sociologists talk to slum dwellers. Economists mostly seem to find visting the local factory or labour exchange a bit hard. Why do they have so little fun?
– Peter T
Thought for the Day: 17 March 2015
[Mr. Putin] is proud, emotional, aggrieved and shrewd — historically a dangerous combination. His skills, well-honed at the K.G.B., include a perfected ability to obfuscate and divide.
Thought for the Day: 3 March 2015
“Beware obsession. Beware secrecy. Beware concentrated power. Beware men untouched by concern for the moral consequences of their acts.”
Thought for the Day: 2 March 2015
Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People
Thought for the Day: 25 February 2015
Source: xkcd
Thought for the Day: 23 February 2015
Once S Fred Singer debated Sherry Rowland about ozone depletion on NPR. Every atmospheric scientist I talked to was amused that Rowland had obviously crushed Singer. Non-scientists thought that Singer held up fairly well (he has – he is really old). There is the problem. Competent scientists know that Singer, Soon, Baliunas and Seitz were pedaling BS in their opposition to protecting the ozone layer. Reagan and Bush knew it and they were the ones that provided knowing leadership to the world concerning the Montreal Protocol. And the Protocol has worked. the abundance of ozone depleting substances has decreased and the decrease in global stratospheric ozone has been arrested. The ozone hole will go away in the future if the world stays at it.
Competent scientists know that Soon’s rants about climate are garbage…. What to say about the folks who choose to believe that Soon is a scientist and that his objections to climate science are significant? Put these people in a functional MRI and you find that the part of their brain that responds to his BS is the part that responds to cocaine. It is not the part that does algebra.
If you do associate with denialists, go have coffee with them and listen to them. I send them something from my course first. Like the First Law treatment of climate. Respect and renewables may rewire brains – rants won’t.
That’s the way it is.
Thought for the Day: 20 February 2015
Great cities need great public transit. The long, sad story of why we don’t have that in Massachusetts can be found in the 2009 MBTA review done by former John Hancock president and CEO David D’Alessandro. After detailing growing costs, falling revenue, and the T’s “Faustian bargain” with debt, it concludes: “There is no question that the MBTA is an expensive and complex system. It requires large expenditures just to continue operating. Any thought that these problems can be addressed primarily through expense reductions is misguided.”
Life isn’t fair. Those problems are now [Gov. Charlie] Baker’s to figure out.
Thought for the Day: 14 February 2015
The Democratic party has its own internal problems on [international trade issues], namely that Bill Clinton lined the party up behind NAFTA and CAFTA, and stood back while the country bled manufacturing jobs, all the while promising that the deals were opening “new markets” for our products in countries where most people earn four bucks a week and can’t buy whatever we still make in this country anywhere. I see closed steel mills and cluttered factories all over this country. I have yet to see footage of Vietnamese workers driving home in Volkswagens that were manufactured in Tennessee. Maybe I’m watching the wrong channel.