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Simon

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What astonishes and sickens me is that a federal elected representative in the United State today is making public pronouncements like this, and not being pilloried from every quarter. It's like American society has rolled back fifty years. :(

 

A friend of mine who lives in Iowa says that the "Rep." in "Rep. Steve King" stands for "Reprehensible".

Well one thing about the Trump Presidency, the White Supremacists are giddily making themselves known. 

 

I guess we'll see if that makes them easier to stop or if there were far more of them than we had feared. 

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Well, first of all, I should apologise for putting words in your mouth, Dean. Pattern Ghost has been more generous to me than I deserve. I was getting rhetorically reckless. If it is any defence, I'm pretty passionate about this. 

 

Apology accepted. And I would not argue that a techno-fix is inevitable. Even if one appears (likely not a single technology, but a disparate bunch of technologies that collectively add up to a Big Solution)... can it be applied in the face of entrenched interests that it disrupts?

 

There may indeed be such a collection of technologies right now. (Speaking of agriculture, the Gaia Hypothesis guy -- argh, I don't have time to look up his name -- suggested a doozy several years ago. He pointed out that agriculture already draws huge amounts of carbon out of the air. Then most of it promptly goes back in. But if agricultural waste -- the stalks, leaves, etc. -- were turned into charcoal and plowed into the soil, a lot of the carbon would *stay* out. Making charcoal is within the capacity of, well, every farmer in the world. Charcoal in the soil also stores water and encourages beneficial fungi, making it a tool for soil improvement, resulting in better yields -- especially critical for poor subsistence farmers. Well, the guy talks a good game anyway.) But any political action may need to be indirect, rather than confronting fossil fuels head on.

 

Beyond that, I'll keep silent. I am not as passionate about this as I could be, and probably should be, because I have no children and will be dead long before the full disaster of climate change becomes apparent. For me, the future is a matter of intellect rather than direct involvement. It galls me that people are not doing what reason says should be done. But I will not be there to experience the consequences.

 

Dean Shomshak

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This is all starting to take a pretty serious toll on me. I was laid off last month (my department was reorganized), and I can;t help but feel there are going to be decreased opportunities in the field I worked in (health care) owing to changes in the law and who gets insurance (and who doesn't). Worse, I strongly suspect that my own health care is going to be taken away, and that my disability income is in peril. In short, the world doesn't need or want me anymore.

 

When the aim of our elected leaders appearing to be inflicting as much suffering as possible on as many people as possible, and the public eager to oblige, I wonder if I live in an evil universe.

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Beyond that, I'll keep silent. I am not as passionate about this as I could be, and probably should be, because I have no children and will be dead long before the full disaster of climate change becomes apparent. For me, the future is a matter of intellect rather than direct involvement. It galls me that people are not doing what reason says should be done. But I will not be there to experience the consequences.

 

I won't be there, but I have two nieces and a nephew that will. And I fear for them. It reminds me in that scene in the TNG episode "The Inner Light" when the scientist whose life Captain Picard is experiencing knows his planet is doomed and is grieved to see his grandchildren because he knows they will suffer for his society's inaction. I believe he says something like "It breaks my heart to see them".

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Michael, I want you to get through this. The evil in the world is real and strong and it has hurt you, but it is neither omnipotent nor omnipresent. Hold on to the faith that there will someday be a place of hope for you to stand in. Please don't succumb to the temptations of grief and despair. I know enough about your character to know that we need people like you. Keep trying, keep fighting, no matter how hard it gets.

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But I will not be there to experience the consequences.

 

I'm sorry, did you think we were going to let you die? You will not escape so easily, my friend.

 

;)

 

Yep.  We still need more Shared Origins publications.  Sorry, Dean, but you can't go until we've squeezed all the gaming goodness out of you.  :winkgrin:

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Latest Fox News poll regarding the public's perception of the Trump presidency. Whatever your opinion of Fox News may be, for the most part this report is a bald recounting of polling numbers over a variety of issues, with interesting and informative demographic breakdowns between Republicans and Democrats, and/or between avowed Trump supporters and opponents. Not all the results are what you might expect.

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One of the few bright spots in current news was hearing Democratic and Republican leaders in the House stand side by side to say, more or less, that Trump's claim he was wiretapped is wack and there's no evidence it ever happened.

 

Lovelock, you mean?

Yes, that's the guy. A quick Googling turned up the New Scientist article, though most of it seems to be behind a subscription wall:

One last chance to save mankind | New Scientist
Jan 21, 2009 - James Lovelock, the man behind the Gaia theory, thinks that climate ... Do we have time to do a similar thing with carbon emissions to save ...

 

However, other articles cite Lovelock's partner Jim Hansen as saying that charcoal sequestration is only a "small part" of a wider CO2 drawdown strategy. I remember the article making a bigger deal of it. Ah, well.

 

Dean Shomshak

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One of the few bright spots in current news was hearing Democratic and Republican leaders in the House stand side by side to say, more or less, that Trump's claim he was wiretapped is wack and there's no evidence it ever happened.

 

 

Indeed. I think all but the wackiest members of both parties appreciate that leaving legally-explosive, unfounded pronouncements like this standing unchallenged sets an incredibly dangerous political precedent.

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In a similar way, people think that increasing diversity is somehow going to magically overcome systemic racism and deeply entrenched biases and grievances. It's not. What we're seeing instead is that it draws that more to the surface and even triggers backlash and an urge towards regression of hard won progress.

 

Actually, I think most people agree with this statement (or should through simple observation of the world).  The problem is disagreement on the root cause, or rather there is "agreement" on that "The other side started it"

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I live in the greater Toronto area, one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse urban regions in the world. Unquestionably there is bigotry and factional friction, but for the most part the interaction of so many diverse groups appears to have fostered general tolerance and acceptance.

 

But tolerance is easy for the group that's on top and feeling secure. When the Muslim world was a global center of wealth and culture, it tended to be much more accepting of differences than Christian Europe. But then the balance of power shifted to the European-descended industrial West, and many Muslims have felt marginalized by that development, notably among those who have tried to participate in that environment.

 

Now many white Christians (nominally at least) are feeling threatened and marginalized, and are lashing out at "the other" as the cause of their problems. I anticipated the rise of this sentiment years ago, but didn't expect it to surge so much so soon.

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