SeniorJunior

We Are Smarter Than That! A friend sent me a fascinating PowerPoint presentation on how gas will probably hit $11 a gallon before too long. (It's from Mathew Simmons' Energy Investment Bank. ) I like it! Plus I'm dreadfully afraid it's true. So then after gasoline hits $11/gallon and natural gas $25 per MMBTU, water will go up, food following in lockstep. Minimum basic food will be entirely too expensive for a billion people to buy. So they will starve. Seriously, starve to death. Billion; that's a thousand millions. Puts earthquakes and Cyclones to shame. I liked the PowerPoint presentation, and I think that Simmons Energy is right. They point out that this is not all bad. The good side effect is declining hydrocarbon use - good for the climate. Still it's a painful way to get there. Well designed, fairly enforced government incentive programs for lower energy use might do the same thing without driving so many individuals and companies to ruin -

The HUGE Three If you're just sit around picking your toes -- or listening to right-wing radio - you might think nothing is happening in scientific progress.   Truth is (ah, truth, facts, actualities!), there is an astonishing acceleration in new discoveries, breakthroughs and invention.  I've picked my fav three, and they are so big I call 'em HUGE. These are going to affect us all.  Big time.  But take any random sample of the population of us U.S.-ers, and you will find darn few aware of even one of them, much less all three.  Why is that?  Simple.  The less simple, the less likely the 'mainstream media' is to cover it.  Methinks: Pix credit:  Duffer's flying pencil [Thus my snide comment about right-wing talk radio, home base for simplistic.  "Nuanced" is their word for anything smacking of complexity.  The huge, complex set of information that spells out "global warming" becomes a "hoax." (Interpretati

Fixing capitalism for the richest country in the world When all this Coronacrap is over, and we have the vaccine and herd immunity has come about, and when we the herd can congregate any damn way we want to, there are still going to be millions of us out of work. Unemployed, busted, homeless, turning to crime or living with our relatives, not to put too fine a point on it. The muscle of capitalism is its workforce.  Ours is in terrible shape, even without the Virus. That really needs to be fixed. We need a healthy, stable, motivated, well trained work force. That's not what we've got right now. Confidence is rattled. Well deserved fear is about.  It's not everybody, but there many million of our fellow citizens who see they are in deep trouble. For capitalism to survive, this has to be fixed. In the days of Roosevelt, there was a functional majority of the nation that decided to support the New Deal. It was proof that government can respond - if imperfectly, per

I notice I've been grousing a lot on the old blog lately. Time - sez I to myself - to write something uplifting, or at least useful. Vacation time is just around the corner. So here: Don’t Deny the Devil There are certain things in the making of recreational choices that color one’s judgment, like a well-tinted pair of sunglasses can make a day look more glamorous than it really is, or a quickly drained dram of tequila can have the same effect on a candidate for social intercourse. The hint of danger is one of those “certain things.” Hints of danger have various thresholds for individuals. Popping one’s ‘chute a thousand feet closer to the ground than usual might hint of danger to a jaded skydiver making the experience beguiling recreation. To the rest of us there are usually less well-defined danger hints. Just considering that hit of tequila, for instance, puts some people off as being ‘way over the limit, fully into danger.’ Depends on your age sometimes

THE NEXT HUGE AMERICAN ADDICTION PROBLEM JUST GETTING STARTED AND GROWING FAST I'm bad. * Opiod addiction in the U.S. is killing, what? 65,000 a year and growing! Way more are  seriously wounded; next year's fatalities.  And our new cell/text addiction is already challenging DUI for accidents with deaths and maimings.  ... Coming down the pike The NEW ADDICTION - promising to scramble our culture - is being hypodermic-ed into our ears, which is a pretty direct route to the BRAIN.   A U D I O B O O K S Addiction Getting Hooked The addiction process starts with long car trips. The miles just slide by while your mind is on an espionage caper or suiting up for an spacewalk over a giant planet. The autodriver we have all trained in our brains does the driving. Gateway Drug Then you start listening while you do work that doesn’t require much thought. You thrill to a daring romance while you vacuum or weed or make beds; your dom

In today’s Washington Post, Susan Jacoby reviews Stephen Prothero’s book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- And Doesn't (HarperSanFrancisco, 2007). Here are a couple of mind boggling excerpts: Americans are … the most religiously ignorant people in the Western world. Fewer than half of us can identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible, and only one third know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount. Approximately 75 percent of adults, according to polls cited by Prothero, mistakenly believe the Bible teaches that "God helps those who help themselves." More than 10 percent think that Noah's wife was Joan of Arc. Only half can name even one of the four Gospels, and -- a finding that will surprise many -- evangelical Christians are only slightly more knowledgeable than their non-evangelical counterparts. Check it out: http://www.bu.edu/religion/faculty/bios/prothero.html And… http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/

Better Than Average Conversation I've told you redundantly of my  writing in the "Comments" sections of various news sites. Since I'm of the liberal persuasion, my opinions in the rightwing comments get hearty disagreements, about half thoughtful and half insulting. My favorite of those was "Die in boiling pig shit, commie." Probably a bot. So today, I wrote a comment in Breitbart about Senator McCain's senior moment at the Comey hearing. You know I stand up for my fellow olde farts. I was pretty un-political in this. seniorjunior (scooter duff) • 13 hours ago Hey, fellow old folks, stand up for Sen McCain! We all have a "senior moment" now and then, but that's just a little turbulence on top of our deep rivers of experience and judgement. All those young farts waxing superior are so far behind in actually knowing what's up will change their minds as they mature... if they last that long. • CHyatt responds right awa