my problem with the 'green new deal' is my problem with the whole climate change 'debate'

There's one thing I like about the 'Green New Deal' unveiled by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement: It's dramatic enough to deal with the scale of the climate change problem. There's one thing I don't like about it, though, and I think it's enough to make it sink like a stone politically: Why is it tied in with this big social-justice agenda (guaranteed jobs, basic income, racial 'equity,' etc.)? What's that got to do with climate change?

I've never really understood why climate change has become this big right-vs-left issue. To me, it's just science. The thing is, the Republicans used to agree with this, back in the 1990s and early 2000s. They were just looking for a market based approach to the issue-- and they came up with one: cap and trade, which came out of the American Enterprise Institute. But then sometime toward the end of that decade the word seems to have gone out that, no, climate change was to be seen as some kind of leftist plot to Take Away Your Freedoms and install a UN One World Government. My guess is that the fossil fuel interests let the GOP bigwigs know that they were not amused.

But now the Democrats are just doubling down on this approach. You may or may not be in favor of Medicare for All, but what on Earth does it have to do with climate change? Nothing, that's what! I just wish the Democrats would deal with this issue alone, on its merits. I think there's plenty there to attract voters turned off by Trump's willful ignorance on the subject. But trying to tie it to this whole left-wing social-justice agenda seems like a really bad, self-defeating idea.

the same people

The thing you have to remember is that the members of the mainstream media are basically the same people as the members of the Democrat party establishment. In some cases, in fact, they're exactly the same people, e.g., George Stephanopoulos, who was Bill Clinton's press secretary and is now an anchor for ABC News. But in general, these people have gone to the same colleges; they live in the same neighborhoods of New York, Washington, LA, and San Francisco; they go to the same parties; they intermarry; and their kids go to the same private schools. Is it any wonder then that the mainstream media parrot the Democrat establishment party line? They're the same people!

silicon valley ubi

I note that a number of these Silicon Valley titans are in favor of UBI-- a  universal basic income. It strikes me that these people have a very high level of a certain type of intelligence-- mathematical/logical ability-- but that they're not particularly politically sophisticated. These people are the intellectual One Percent, or even the One Tenth of One Percent, and they simply don't understand 'ordinary people.' My guess is that they basically consider the vast mass of humanity as low-grade ore who will eventually be replaced by robots or algorithms of some sort. So their idea is just to buy these folks off in the hope that after a while they'll see the handwriting on the wall and simply stop reproducing.

literature

For some time now, I've had the sneaking suspicion that literature-- fiction, poetry, drama-- is what people who are no good at math do with their brains.

planetarianism vs. imperialism

In my beleaguered mind, there are two big-picture ways of looking at the world: the planetary point of view, as exemplified in my 'planetarian blog,' and one that looks back to the great European empires of the nineteenth century and even to great non-European empires of the past. This blog, 'Flyoverlandia,' favors this latter view. It's a more romantic, emotion-laden view of things than the Enlightenment-based planetarian view.

World War I was the great disaster for the European empires. True, they sputtered on and finally received their death blows in World War II. By the 1950s and '60s, Britain and France were divesting themselves of these overseas possessions wholesale, although not always peaceably.

I could see a return to these empires, and some others, in the coming decades. It would have to be done on a looser and more reciprocal basis, of course, but I could see major economic and even political links between the old imperial capitals and their former possessions emerging in the years ahead. This would include not only Britain and France, but Spain, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Portugal in Europe, plus the United States (North America, the Philippines), India, China, and Japan.

who cares?

I get very tired of news reports about what this or that celebrity 'thinks' about something. It reminds me of a statistic I came across years ago. People were polled as to  what celebrities they followed avidly. At the top of the list was Madonna, who was then at the apex of her stardom. Yet only 8% of those polled said they followed her career and pronouncements with great interest. Eight percent!

So when I hear some late-night talk show host quoted on this or that subject, I ask, 'Who cares.?' The fact is, even the most popular of these people only gets a couple million viewers a night-- this in a country of a third of a billion people! Why should anybody else care what these people 'think'-- and why is the media bothering to tell us?

npc

Twitter tried to ban these so-called 'NPC' memes, but they still seem to be all over the place: