Political derangement from the top down: This is my view of what our politics is nowadays. The governor of California thinks climate change is more important than the willful extermination of ethnic minority populations in China.
https://twitter.com/AnnaKwokFY/status/1719153880418660793
Here’s a screen grab since the tweets don’t play nicely by embedding on Substack:
It’s just one great big freak show.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/lithium-sales-plummet-as-ev-demand-dwindles/
I don't know if any of you saw this. EV sales are declining, taking down the demand for lithium. The articles we're studying for Current Environmental Issues all assume continued exponential growth.
I am a little over halfway through David McCullough's biography of Harry S. Truman (54 hours total!!!) It is fascinating - made me want Truman's ghost to haunt a certain living past president.
WRT to climate change and human rights: At one point, the former head of TVA is being questioned by the Senate for the job of head of the Atomic Energy Commission. There is some concern that he, David Lilienthal, is soft on communism, " (the TVA was a "hotbed of Communism"), reinforced by the fact he is a Jew whose parents came from Czechoslovakia, now under control of the Soviets. He is asked to explain his views on "the communistic doctrine."
He answered:
"I believe in, and I conceive the Constitution of the United States to rest, as does religion, upon the fundamental proposition of the integrity of the individual; and that all Government and all private institutions must be designed to promote and protect and defend the integrity and the dignity of the individual...
"Any forms of government, therefore, and any other institutions, which make men means rather than ends in themselves, which exalt that state..., which place arbitrary power over men as a fundamental tenet of government, are contrary to this conception."
That is the conflict we face against China, Russia, Iran, Hamas, the warlords in Sudan: governments who make humans the means rather than the ends.
I highly recommend the book.