1) I actually listened to Trump's farewell speech, not because I was interested, but I was making sure he actually left, to say good riddance. However, what he actually said, illustrates the pure mendacity of Trump and his time in office.
2) As usual, Trump was claiming credit for creating an economic miracle, which was an outright lie because the economy was recovering very strongly under the Obama regime before Trump took over and much of the success was due to this, not Trump's policy.
3) This is why I am posting this, not that I am usually bothered with any analysis of what the pathological liar Trump actually said. You see, Trump was claiming any economic success the Biden regime has, is down to him.
4) Before forgetting about Trump completely, I thought it was worth highlighting the mechanics of Trump's outrageous lies.
5) When Trump came into office he wanted to take all credit for the strength of the economy, even though this was nothing to do with him as he hadn't introduced any fiscal policy himself when he started taking credit.
6) What Trump was doing was denying that any economic success could be handed down from one regime to the next. Denying the principle completely. Yet now he wants to reverse his principle, and claim all responsibility for any economic success under the Biden regime.
7) I am highlighting this because I've long noticed this pattern of dishonest argument used by politicians in general, but with Trump far more. What they do, is to invoke general principles as the guiding logic of their argument i.e. the premise of it.
8) However, when it suits them, they will ditch this principle completely, totally deny it, and argue the diametric opposite of what they argued previously. It demonstrates a total disregard for the truth, logic and reason.
9) Just to lay out the background. When Obama became president in 2009, there had just been the 2008 financial crash, so for much of Obama's presidency, all economies were recovering from this. Trump took over, just as the word's economies had recovered from the 2008 crash.
10) Therefore all Trump's boasting about achieving some economic miracle, no previous regime had achieved, is just pure bullshit, as the economic recovery had taken place before he became president. This is pure Trump, taking credit for the work of others.
PS. I'm not bothered if anyone reads this, because it is now largely irrelevant now the pathological liar that is Trump, is gone. I was just stating it for the record.
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1) This illustrates the whole climate and ecological emergency in a nutshell. The world is heading towards a climate catastrophe, but the most obvious ways to reduce our carbon emissions are being ignored, because billionaires can't profit from the solutions.
2) The most effective ways to reduce carbon emissions are to restore the Earth's peat bogs, rewild the land, restore natural forests, eat drastically less meat, and stop extracting and burning fossil fuels. It really is that simple. nature.com/articles/d4158…
3) These are quite simple to achieve, we could start straight away, none require magic technology, and have been known about as effective solutions for decades. So why don't we pursue these simple natural solutions? @GretaThunberg@GeorgeMonbiot naturalclimate.solutions
1) Science denial is destroying our societies, our civilization. Various vested interests, usually right wing ideologues find various scientific facts and information contrary to their agenda, so through propaganda they are orchestrating the public into denying this science.
2) We are seeing this with regard to the COVID virus, where a range of denial is being promoted, ranging from absolute denial the virus exists, to different levels of denial, such as only some people are vulnerable to the virus, to facilitate business as usual.
3) For a long time, to promote business as usual, vested interests have been promoting the denial of the climate and ecological crisis through propaganda. The aim being to create a large enough body of public denial to prevent action which can change anything.
1) What system change means is the change to a sustainable system i.e. one without the ongoing adverse trends that will lead to civilization collapse i.e. where our current organized economies split up and become disorganized.
2) However, it's a mistake that this system can be envisaged in anything other than the general recognition of the situation and us i.e. the majority recognising that our societies, economies are totally reliant on natural systems, and this means working within what is possible.
3) There is no society wide understanding that our modern civilization is entirely dependent on natural systems. There is virtually no understanding of systems in our society and even less about how ecosystems operate.
First the article starts of by falsely claiming that GMO's are safe. All GMOs are different and there is no general rule that can be used to generalize them. Natural organisms range from staple foodstuffs, to the most deadly and poisonous of organisms. GMOs can be more varied.
Therefore, there is nothing general you can say about the safety of an organism based on it being genetically modified.
1) @GeorgeMonbiot is entirely correct about humans having a weakness "that makes us highly susceptible to charlatans". I have spent a life time, 50 years of my life, thinking about this very deeply and I have a fully worked out explanation consistent with the evidence.
2) Here I will lay out this explanation in this tweet thread. It's obviously in abbreviated form and I can't provide all the supporting evidence here because of the format.
3) Let me first outline a basic thinking tool I've developed for thinking about this. I imagine the whole of history (not just written events), but everything that's happened, on a timeline like that of a video, which you can rewind, replay etc.
1) This isn't even greenwash, it is green tokenism. As @GretaThunberg points out, we have only about 8 or so years of our total carbon budget left to avoid more than 1.5C of warming. theguardian.com/environment/20…
2) What the remaining carbon budget means is the total carbon we have left to emit before that level of warming becomes locked into the system. The time remaining means at the current rate of emissions, how many years left before all this budget is used up.
3) It doesn't mean that at the end of that time period we have to start reducing our emissions. It means at the end of that period we couldn't burn any more fossil fuels at all, and would have to produce zero emissions, not net zero.