Aug 14, 2023·edited Aug 14, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
“Prager U doesn’t pay its animators” LOL.
It’s a hard row to hoe for conservatives, when about 70% of the country hates their actual political policies. The only possible solution is a two-pronged approach: restrict and repress voting – fuck the consent of the governed – and try to turn the generation that follows Gen Z into citizens of Idiocracy so in about 15 or 20 years they may actually vote for Republicans.
It isn’t really much of a plan, but it’s the only one they’ve got.
And it isn't even an especially effective bullshit barrage. If you're going to bullshit it should stand up to casual scrutiny, and only be discovered as false after a little digging. But what they're doing amounts to "look over there! Squirrel!!!"
"They're all crooks" is embedded so deep in so many people's brains (and has just enough truth about it) that you don't need much to trigger that response. Let's do the math: "Joe Biden's son is being investigated" = "Donald Trump is being prosecuted." Understanding the difference between the two would involve looking into details, and lots of people just don't do details.
"They're all crooks" might be the oldest and most deeply embedded trope in American history. It's strength is a testimony to how much most Americans hate politics. They all want to be Thomas Jefferson, playing Mad Libs with the Bible on their plantation and screwing their slaves while trying to cross-breed grapes for higher sugar content, while the gummint just leaves them alone. Ain't that America, as Stephen Foster once sang.
Yeah, on the surface it seems like the plain-spoken commonsensical Mark-Twain-style skepticism that we should all be proud of as our American heritage. In practice, it just provides cover to the worst of the crooks.
Yeah, it was all jolly fun with your chums, Guilded Age Savvy, because back then the federal government was a punch line in a sleepy backwater swamp no one in their right mind would go to other than squeeze cash out of Uncle Sam. The 1-2 punch of the Great Depression and WWIi, really the fallout of FDR-'s success at confronting both, smashed the brains of the Jeffersonian philosopher kings who ruled their little patches. The song is over, but the melody lingers on as a cynical denial of agency or responsibility. Those clowns in Congress are at it again will be The United States' epitath.
At this moment, I feel like we need more democracy on individual issues (so referenda), and less picking nominees (bosses and sm—uh, vapour-filled rooms). I think some of the Founders might agree, because usually the Mobile Party's passions are stupider and violent for really unsuitable men (and [edit] maybe, if society advances enough,[/edit]women and non-binaries) than over issues, though mistaking zygotes-through-foetuses for people seems a pretty exciting brain-worm.
"At this moment, I feel like we need more democracy on individual issues (so referenda),"
I want to like this idea, but I remember that some of the Founders were men who owned other people and thought this should continue in perpetuity. When they lost, their heirs have spent 150 years and counting trying to recreate antebellum conditions. They'll concede one or two points to keep the rest.
I honestly think that the only solution to this is technology advanced, wide-spreadable, and sustainable enough that even if they still have a lot more than most of us the rest of us will still be in decent shape. My basis for thinking this is that this seems to me to have been the optimal solution so far.
It depends on there being enough extremely rich people who either don't give a damn at all about us or feel a little-to-fairly benignly toward us; the problem is the ones who'd actively _rather_ be kings of trash-heaps, people for whom it's not Heaven unless they can watch the rest of us in Hell.
I want Roy's version to be an actual animated cartoon. If we do it to the same level of production values used by Prager, I think we can easily crowdsource the $100 required.
School cartoons have fallen a long way from “Hemo the Magnificent,” the way a generation of doctors learned about red and white blood cells. The combination of an 8000 teacher shortage and introduction of PragerU in Florida promises a state population of future adults who think Abe Lincoln was a tyrant who got what he deserved.
Florida has struggled with teacher shortages for the last 25 years. The tail-end of my political consulting career was candidates for school boards and county commissions in Florida, and it was always interesting to hear these people talk about the sorry state of education. The standards for teachers were too low, they'd say. The absolute minimum should be a Master's in education or child development, and a PhD should be a general requirement to ensure that the teachers were knowledgeable.
And the next thing you'd hear coming out of those same mouths was complaining that paying teachers more than $20,000 a year was way too much; that giving them supplies like paper or pencils was some kind of extreme welfare; that every one of those teachers who held a Master's degree had been indoctrinated by the liberal universities.
Most teachers are ladies, and their husbands support them. Teaching is a hobby "job," because they like children, as all ladies do. It's really just babysitting.
The 3 S's in education: Shortage of teachers triggers higher Standards for hiring and lower Salaries. Learned this back in the 1980's in grad school, getting my masters in Education.
A stiff, zombie-like Martin Luther King appears to repeat "content of their character" and "better to be a slave than killed, no?" over and over.
This was brilliant, sadly. Look at how low these motherfuckers have taken us, that a half-assed right-wing radio host's completely unaccredited propaganda grift is approved to indoctrinate kids in Florida, and countless other states to come.
Since conservatives see all Black people as two-dimensional, it's only natural that they'd view history-making Black folks as 2-D cartoons. King only uttered a single sentence, and Douglass was secretly a Trump supporter before Trump even existed. Looks like Poe's Law strikes again!
I agree! Conservatives see the whole fucking universe as a cartoon. That’s why their rhetoric is so empty, full of buzzwords, selectively applied, like freedom, prolife, small government, election integrity, American, etc. They rarely provide specifics or examples in support of their “principles”. Their enemies are portrayed as comic book or Marvel Universe hordes of villainous mercenaries under the sway of evil overlords. The Dems are “destroying the country,” but the Cons never say exactly how. (One of the saddest parts is that the corporate media never ask them to define these things.) All of conservative “intellectual theory” is nerd commentary on their ideological comic strip.
Every one of these screaming banshees at school board meetings and the like should be made to define "woke." Then we cut it together, add an underscore of Yakity Sax, and we've got gold.
I do like the policy proposal on his website wherein he promises to “pown the libtards”. That the sort of can-do common sense conservatism this country needs.
One Iowa voter interviewed this weekend at the State Fair said he was outraged that a gallon of gas costs more than a gallon of milk, a new metric that tells him Joe Biden is a terrible President.
Ah, I think I get it: The right-wing-o-verse is like the inside of the Flintstone's house: You walk and walk, and the background is just endlessly recycled behind you.
See, the conservative world is much like an episode of The Herculoids, or Space Ghost. Folks are just sitting around, minding their own business, when some evil force appears and starts messing shit up for no obvious reason. Then the bad people with the thick accents are driven away, and peace reigns once more. Why do these things happen? Who knows? They just do! No history, no causes, no explanations, just Bad Stuff From Elsewhere.
I got a plan. You know how the Cons have mostly fucked up education with the charter school scam? The one they put in place so that they can resegregate the schools, keep their kids under the yoke of ignorance with their Bible nonsense while they Hoover up every dollar they can to steal for themselves?
Let's open our own charter schools based on the Arts, Humanities, Science and basic human decency. We will teach our kids actual knowledge. We take all the money charter schools steal for their owners and put it back into the schools. I bet they'd be almost as good as public schools but even better because the whole curriculum won't be based on teaching no-neck little racist kids that Jesus rode dinosaurs.
This is a righteous rant: Thank you! and the reduction of great men to cartoons is a feature of Conservative "thought": it's what the Judicial Necromancy of Originialism and Textualism exists for: resurrect the dead to hold convenient opinions on the matters of the day they never imagined.
Of course, Clearance Thomas (like Mayor Adams seems to be trying) made himself a cartoon since his confirmation hearing.
I can see the animation now: The RV King climbs down from the cab, wanders back to look at the loose lugnuts, the Madwoman reaches around to close the door to keep the AC in, inadvertently pops that baby in reverse, and RVK gets tossed under his own bus.
The cake-icing is to loop that scene for 10 hours.
Prager U and education are an oxymoron. Our kids might as well be educated at Trump University. At least Trump U only pretends to deliver a top-notch education, Prager U actually believes all it’s nonsense and is nothing more than a propaganda machine.
Fun fact: Prager U isn't actually a university, they're not accredited, they don't offer degrees or even classes. Funny, it's like every other word out of their mouths is a lie, huh?
Agreed, they have a lot in common with Trump U; non accredited nonsensical teachings that will kill at least a billion vibrant brain cells.
That said, they also teach that solar and wind are actual polluting our air and contaminating our water supply. You don’t need to be Nostradamus to know who’s funding these lunatics: fossil fuel companies and right-wing billionaires.
Between Moms for Liberty, Prager U and The Federalist Society, we have the prefect trifecta of organizations committed to the dumbing down of America and instituting a Christian version of Sharia Law on all of America’s institutions, and our kids.
Their Creedo should be “get them young and keep them dumb!”....:)
He inherited rental property. Then he conned his way into a radio spot on the weekends, AM talk radio, unpaid. His self-promotion back in the 1980s was so cheap his press packets looked like something a child would do.
I recall all this because I saw his beginnings and have other bizarre anecdotes of personal and secondhand encounters with the man, the moron, Dennis.
Well, since they took away the "news source" that was a bathroom full of classified documents. More likely to find nuggets of information that could be turned into possible money-making opportunities in the bathroom, I think.
Aug 14, 2023·edited Aug 14, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
Hey, anybody else catch this NY Times story over the weekend, seems like renewable energy is really taking off, growing much faster than the experts had predicted:
Meanwhile, kids in Florida can watch Prager cartoons about how solar and wind are too expensive and unreliable which is why we need to stick with coal:
Then when they graduate High School they can look at all the new job opportunities in green energy and go, "Nah, there's no future in that, I'll just go work at QuikTrip."
I remember a Professor from my school writing an op-ed for the local paper in which he claimed that evolution broke the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics because evolution needed a decrease in entropy which required energy. Now he taught thermo, but I knew he was wrong right away, as the conservation of energy thing he was spouting only works for an isolated system, but the Earth is basically a closed system (matter does not exchange but energy does). Thus, any idiot that knew the 2nd Law would know he was wrong, but this was a big creationist talking point in the mid-90s
One professor in the engineering faculty at U of I was a hard-core creationist, I remember getting a warning from other students that he's perfectly rational when he's on-topic, but be careful not to trigger him, or there goes the whole class period.
Not mentioned: Renewable energy has been so successful in Texas that the state legislature is passing bills to support fossil fuel power generators, while pushing legislation that actually -restricts- wind and solar developments.
Aug 14, 2023·edited Aug 14, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
"State leaders set a 2025 goal of getting 10,000 megawatts of power from renewables; the state already has five times more than that, mostly from wind."
These anti-renewable right-wingers aren't going to succeed, the economic advantage of not having to pay for fuel is too great (gee, imagine that!) These efforts to push fossil fuels over renewables are just spitting into the wind.
I think that was their plan, BP was even billing itself as "Beyond Petroleum". It only took a spike in worldwide oil prices to make them scrap that plan, those oil profits are just too addictive. Yes, renewables can offer profits too, but it's nothing like what you get when oil is over $100 a barrel.
Flashback to my brother-in-law a few weeks back yelling about all the fossil fuels under the North American continent and how we need to cut our depence on foreign oil, because if there's one thing that drives conservatives hyper-batshit, it's being the slight bit dependent on someone else.
Ranchers be all "Cows and wind farms git along just fine. Them legislators don't even work but once every other year or so. Anyway, I'm still just settin' back and watchin' the cash flow..."
Renewable energy is a potent political issue that works to the advantage of the Republicans until large numbers of people begin to directly benefit from it, at which point it instantly switches to a nonpolitical issue that benefits neither party*. In this, it follows exactly the same path as every other successful policy advocated by those silly liberals, from Social Security to Medicare to Obamacare.
*Seems like we might be skipping a step here, but I'm not sure.
*There is that moment when individual single-family-dwelling rooftops reach solar energy turnaround point (when the People® start selling energy back to the grid) and BigAss Solar suddenly corrals every public official into the Nope, no Mas Dinero policy.
So NYT, an article on clean energy taking off followed by an article on “environmental groups” threatening to sue to block offshore wind farms. Both sides!
We know some of the players in that little Jersey beach blanket babylon. The ones who managed (thru data!) to get the planned wind farms moved away from the offshore migratory bird routes. They are Jerseyans too, and just shake their heads about the whole NIMBY-pretending-wildlife-protection squad.
I watch some of that stupid video. Cartoon Douglass said that the Funders knew that slavery was wrong. There were no founders from South Carolina and Georgia?
I am reading Carol Anderson's Second, about the racial history of the right to bear arms, and she wrote that South Carolina and Georgia were actually worse. That stupid video claimed that the Founders believed that slavery would eventually disappear. I wonder if Prager has read Douglass' thoughts on American Christianity and the Fourth of July.
I think it likely that some of the founders did think slavery would disappear eventually. That was before some of Eli Whitney's slaves invented the cotton gin and made slavery pay
Some of them did know that slavery was wrong but also didn't want to discommode the one's that benefitted from it and lose their votes for the new Constitution. That's why they set the date for a possible end to the slave trade 20 years in the future.
Well, see, there were these guys just standing around the South, not doing anything, who knows how they got there, but white landowners came along and offered them employment opportunities. And then about 1865 they realized what they had been doing was wrong and stopped it! And no PoC has ever had a problem anywhere in the Southeast US since.
Respectfully: 'Clarence, youʼre a crook!' would be terser and puts the two 'k' sounds closer to each other, and I gather that 'k' sounds are for humour as fissile materials are for chain-reactions, which is why 'K.K.K.' is the funniest word in English, I guess.
I was laughing at that first sentence -- I mean PragerU and Douglass in the same sentence.
As for the rest of the post, funny but not all funny obviously(?).
“Prager U doesn’t pay its animators” LOL.
It’s a hard row to hoe for conservatives, when about 70% of the country hates their actual political policies. The only possible solution is a two-pronged approach: restrict and repress voting – fuck the consent of the governed – and try to turn the generation that follows Gen Z into citizens of Idiocracy so in about 15 or 20 years they may actually vote for Republicans.
It isn’t really much of a plan, but it’s the only one they’ve got.
3. Bullshit barrage to confuse the lazy/weak/overstressed.
And it isn't even an especially effective bullshit barrage. If you're going to bullshit it should stand up to casual scrutiny, and only be discovered as false after a little digging. But what they're doing amounts to "look over there! Squirrel!!!"
Benghazi! Burisma! Her E-mails! It's like some kind of fucked up beat poetry.
Instead of bongos, accompaniment is cops beating Black people's heads with nightsticks.
I'm hip, but man them dudes got zero rhythm. Bad scene, man...
"Keys! Jingling keys! Look!"
"They're all crooks" is embedded so deep in so many people's brains (and has just enough truth about it) that you don't need much to trigger that response. Let's do the math: "Joe Biden's son is being investigated" = "Donald Trump is being prosecuted." Understanding the difference between the two would involve looking into details, and lots of people just don't do details.
"They're all crooks" might be the oldest and most deeply embedded trope in American history. It's strength is a testimony to how much most Americans hate politics. They all want to be Thomas Jefferson, playing Mad Libs with the Bible on their plantation and screwing their slaves while trying to cross-breed grapes for higher sugar content, while the gummint just leaves them alone. Ain't that America, as Stephen Foster once sang.
Yeah, on the surface it seems like the plain-spoken commonsensical Mark-Twain-style skepticism that we should all be proud of as our American heritage. In practice, it just provides cover to the worst of the crooks.
Yeah, it was all jolly fun with your chums, Guilded Age Savvy, because back then the federal government was a punch line in a sleepy backwater swamp no one in their right mind would go to other than squeeze cash out of Uncle Sam. The 1-2 punch of the Great Depression and WWIi, really the fallout of FDR-'s success at confronting both, smashed the brains of the Jeffersonian philosopher kings who ruled their little patches. The song is over, but the melody lingers on as a cynical denial of agency or responsibility. Those clowns in Congress are at it again will be The United States' epitath.
At this moment, I feel like we need more democracy on individual issues (so referenda), and less picking nominees (bosses and sm—uh, vapour-filled rooms). I think some of the Founders might agree, because usually the Mobile Party's passions are stupider and violent for really unsuitable men (and [edit] maybe, if society advances enough,[/edit]women and non-binaries) than over issues, though mistaking zygotes-through-foetuses for people seems a pretty exciting brain-worm.
Brain-worm be all "OOOOO!! I LIKE that one!!!"
"At this moment, I feel like we need more democracy on individual issues (so referenda),"
I want to like this idea, but I remember that some of the Founders were men who owned other people and thought this should continue in perpetuity. When they lost, their heirs have spent 150 years and counting trying to recreate antebellum conditions. They'll concede one or two points to keep the rest.
I honestly think that the only solution to this is technology advanced, wide-spreadable, and sustainable enough that even if they still have a lot more than most of us the rest of us will still be in decent shape. My basis for thinking this is that this seems to me to have been the optimal solution so far.
It depends on there being enough extremely rich people who either don't give a damn at all about us or feel a little-to-fairly benignly toward us; the problem is the ones who'd actively _rather_ be kings of trash-heaps, people for whom it's not Heaven unless they can watch the rest of us in Hell.
and the joke's on them because No Heaven, No Hell, No Worries.
"What the fuck?"
Obviously this isn't original but I gotta say, seldom have I seen it used to greater effect . I laughed really hard!
I want Roy's version to be an actual animated cartoon. If we do it to the same level of production values used by Prager, I think we can easily crowdsource the $100 required.
wait, are you saying we're actually going to pay our animators?
Agree. They'll do it for free. For the exposure!
"Congratulations, you've been exposed as a really shitty animator. No doubt your career will really take off now, no need to thank us."
School cartoons have fallen a long way from “Hemo the Magnificent,” the way a generation of doctors learned about red and white blood cells. The combination of an 8000 teacher shortage and introduction of PragerU in Florida promises a state population of future adults who think Abe Lincoln was a tyrant who got what he deserved.
Florida has struggled with teacher shortages for the last 25 years. The tail-end of my political consulting career was candidates for school boards and county commissions in Florida, and it was always interesting to hear these people talk about the sorry state of education. The standards for teachers were too low, they'd say. The absolute minimum should be a Master's in education or child development, and a PhD should be a general requirement to ensure that the teachers were knowledgeable.
And the next thing you'd hear coming out of those same mouths was complaining that paying teachers more than $20,000 a year was way too much; that giving them supplies like paper or pencils was some kind of extreme welfare; that every one of those teachers who held a Master's degree had been indoctrinated by the liberal universities.
Most teachers are ladies, and their husbands support them. Teaching is a hobby "job," because they like children, as all ladies do. It's really just babysitting.
Open your Bible to page 1 and have the kids take turns reading. How hard can it be?
The 3 S's in education: Shortage of teachers triggers higher Standards for hiring and lower Salaries. Learned this back in the 1980's in grad school, getting my masters in Education.
Thanks for reminding me about Hemo. As soon as he showed up, I *knew* in my li‘l 5th-grade heart that he was gonna be a colossal prick.
Thanks for triggering fond memories of Hemo, we saw him whenever our 7th grade science teacher needed a break, or had a hangover.
And MLK said exactly one sentence before he was killed.
Directed by Frank Capra!
Alternate ending:
A stiff, zombie-like Martin Luther King appears to repeat "content of their character" and "better to be a slave than killed, no?" over and over.
This was brilliant, sadly. Look at how low these motherfuckers have taken us, that a half-assed right-wing radio host's completely unaccredited propaganda grift is approved to indoctrinate kids in Florida, and countless other states to come.
KingBot: "The content of their character... [whir, click] The content of their character... "
Since conservatives see all Black people as two-dimensional, it's only natural that they'd view history-making Black folks as 2-D cartoons. King only uttered a single sentence, and Douglass was secretly a Trump supporter before Trump even existed. Looks like Poe's Law strikes again!
I agree! Conservatives see the whole fucking universe as a cartoon. That’s why their rhetoric is so empty, full of buzzwords, selectively applied, like freedom, prolife, small government, election integrity, American, etc. They rarely provide specifics or examples in support of their “principles”. Their enemies are portrayed as comic book or Marvel Universe hordes of villainous mercenaries under the sway of evil overlords. The Dems are “destroying the country,” but the Cons never say exactly how. (One of the saddest parts is that the corporate media never ask them to define these things.) All of conservative “intellectual theory” is nerd commentary on their ideological comic strip.
Every one of these screaming banshees at school board meetings and the like should be made to define "woke." Then we cut it together, add an underscore of Yakity Sax, and we've got gold.
"I voted for President Trump because of his policies!"
"OK, other than 'build a wall', name one."
His policy of sick burns on people I hate.
I do like the policy proposal on his website wherein he promises to “pown the libtards”. That the sort of can-do common sense conservatism this country needs.
One Iowa voter interviewed this weekend at the State Fair said he was outraged that a gallon of gas costs more than a gallon of milk, a new metric that tells him Joe Biden is a terrible President.
Cue Nate Silver: "No incumbent President with a gas/milk ratio greater than 1 has ever been reelected."
Always love to see the "small government" radicals blame the President when celery prices rise.
If the milk price exceeded the gas price, said voter would again be outraged. The point isn't the metric, but the hating Biden
I'd tell him to just put milk in his car, then, and see how far he gets.
I got an analysis of old Hanna-Barbera cartoons along these lines which I'll explicate on later.
Ah, I think I get it: The right-wing-o-verse is like the inside of the Flintstone's house: You walk and walk, and the background is just endlessly recycled behind you.
No, no, that's TV news.
See, the conservative world is much like an episode of The Herculoids, or Space Ghost. Folks are just sitting around, minding their own business, when some evil force appears and starts messing shit up for no obvious reason. Then the bad people with the thick accents are driven away, and peace reigns once more. Why do these things happen? Who knows? They just do! No history, no causes, no explanations, just Bad Stuff From Elsewhere.
To be fair, there's plenty Chuck Jones options I'd love to see dropped on the tragi-comic republican cartoon characters.
I had in mind more Stan Lee.
Leo and Layla visit Adam Smith: "Hey kids, without capitalism we wouldn't have these rocket-powered roller skates!"
The ACME Corporation would make a killing (with laughter, people, with laughter)
I got a plan. You know how the Cons have mostly fucked up education with the charter school scam? The one they put in place so that they can resegregate the schools, keep their kids under the yoke of ignorance with their Bible nonsense while they Hoover up every dollar they can to steal for themselves?
Let's open our own charter schools based on the Arts, Humanities, Science and basic human decency. We will teach our kids actual knowledge. We take all the money charter schools steal for their owners and put it back into the schools. I bet they'd be almost as good as public schools but even better because the whole curriculum won't be based on teaching no-neck little racist kids that Jesus rode dinosaurs.
This is a righteous rant: Thank you! and the reduction of great men to cartoons is a feature of Conservative "thought": it's what the Judicial Necromancy of Originialism and Textualism exists for: resurrect the dead to hold convenient opinions on the matters of the day they never imagined.
Of course, Clearance Thomas (like Mayor Adams seems to be trying) made himself a cartoon since his confirmation hearing.
I can see the animation now: The RV King climbs down from the cab, wanders back to look at the loose lugnuts, the Madwoman reaches around to close the door to keep the AC in, inadvertently pops that baby in reverse, and RVK gets tossed under his own bus.
The cake-icing is to loop that scene for 10 hours.
"tossed under his own bus"
About time, "hoist on his own petard" was getting old, and nobody knows what a petard is anyways, we needed a modern version.
Prager U and education are an oxymoron. Our kids might as well be educated at Trump University. At least Trump U only pretends to deliver a top-notch education, Prager U actually believes all it’s nonsense and is nothing more than a propaganda machine.
Fun fact: Prager U isn't actually a university, they're not accredited, they don't offer degrees or even classes. Funny, it's like every other word out of their mouths is a lie, huh?
Agreed, they have a lot in common with Trump U; non accredited nonsensical teachings that will kill at least a billion vibrant brain cells.
That said, they also teach that solar and wind are actual polluting our air and contaminating our water supply. You don’t need to be Nostradamus to know who’s funding these lunatics: fossil fuel companies and right-wing billionaires.
Between Moms for Liberty, Prager U and The Federalist Society, we have the prefect trifecta of organizations committed to the dumbing down of America and instituting a Christian version of Sharia Law on all of America’s institutions, and our kids.
Their Creedo should be “get them young and keep them dumb!”....:)
if you define 'every other' as every.
I'm totally prepared to learn that Dennis Prager's name isn't actually Dennis Prager and that he's wanted for murder in multiple states.
And I'm sure some smart lawyer told him if you just use the letter U, you can't be sued for fraud. It's the educational equivalent of Froot Loops.
Fraud U, or FU for short.
He inherited rental property. Then he conned his way into a radio spot on the weekends, AM talk radio, unpaid. His self-promotion back in the 1980s was so cheap his press packets looked like something a child would do.
I recall all this because I saw his beginnings and have other bizarre anecdotes of personal and secondhand encounters with the man, the moron, Dennis.
The "Landlord to asshole" pipeline never fails.
Rentier class. Explains much.
Do tell.
I know, right?
There may be some deets too personally linked to unveil safely, but we won't tell, we promise!
That’s why it’s “U” and not university. It could stand for “uneducated” or “unintelligent” or “unfuckable.”
"Hey, Prager U too, asshole!"
Have taken to calling it "Prager Unsinn"
Yeah, at least University of Austin has an actual campus.
That Douglass is doing an amazing job and being recognized more and more!
I'm guessing Trump uses PragerU as a news source.
Well, since they took away the "news source" that was a bathroom full of classified documents. More likely to find nuggets of information that could be turned into possible money-making opportunities in the bathroom, I think.
„If I weren’t animated so goddamn stiff, I’d beat your ass into the ground“ Damn it, what a truly awesome way to start the week
I haven't read better satire since "A Modest Proposal."
Hey, anybody else catch this NY Times story over the weekend, seems like renewable energy is really taking off, growing much faster than the experts had predicted:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/12/climate/clean-energy-us-fossil-fuels.html
Meanwhile, kids in Florida can watch Prager cartoons about how solar and wind are too expensive and unreliable which is why we need to stick with coal:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/10/florida-ron-desantis-climate-vidoes-school-curriculum
Then when they graduate High School they can look at all the new job opportunities in green energy and go, "Nah, there's no future in that, I'll just go work at QuikTrip."
"This Prager U video on how solar doesn't work is being powered by the solar panels on the roof of your school."
I guess it makes sense, get 'em some early practice in cognitive dissonance, soon to be an essential life skill.
I remember a Professor from my school writing an op-ed for the local paper in which he claimed that evolution broke the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics because evolution needed a decrease in entropy which required energy. Now he taught thermo, but I knew he was wrong right away, as the conservation of energy thing he was spouting only works for an isolated system, but the Earth is basically a closed system (matter does not exchange but energy does). Thus, any idiot that knew the 2nd Law would know he was wrong, but this was a big creationist talking point in the mid-90s
One professor in the engineering faculty at U of I was a hard-core creationist, I remember getting a warning from other students that he's perfectly rational when he's on-topic, but be careful not to trigger him, or there goes the whole class period.
Not mentioned: Renewable energy has been so successful in Texas that the state legislature is passing bills to support fossil fuel power generators, while pushing legislation that actually -restricts- wind and solar developments.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/25/texas-energy-renewables-natural-gas-grid-politics/
"State leaders set a 2025 goal of getting 10,000 megawatts of power from renewables; the state already has five times more than that, mostly from wind."
These anti-renewable right-wingers aren't going to succeed, the economic advantage of not having to pay for fuel is too great (gee, imagine that!) These efforts to push fossil fuels over renewables are just spitting into the wind.
If the assholes who run fossil fuel companies were smart, they'd be investing in renewables instead of trying to delay the inevitable.
I think that was their plan, BP was even billing itself as "Beyond Petroleum". It only took a spike in worldwide oil prices to make them scrap that plan, those oil profits are just too addictive. Yes, renewables can offer profits too, but it's nothing like what you get when oil is over $100 a barrel.
"I'm gonna kick tomorrow..."
They are. But still gonna squeeze every penny out of the ground.
Flashback to my brother-in-law a few weeks back yelling about all the fossil fuels under the North American continent and how we need to cut our depence on foreign oil, because if there's one thing that drives conservatives hyper-batshit, it's being the slight bit dependent on someone else.
Yeah, and the US is already the World's Largest Producer...
Ranchers be all "Cows and wind farms git along just fine. Them legislators don't even work but once every other year or so. Anyway, I'm still just settin' back and watchin' the cash flow..."
Renewable energy is a potent political issue that works to the advantage of the Republicans until large numbers of people begin to directly benefit from it, at which point it instantly switches to a nonpolitical issue that benefits neither party*. In this, it follows exactly the same path as every other successful policy advocated by those silly liberals, from Social Security to Medicare to Obamacare.
*Seems like we might be skipping a step here, but I'm not sure.
*There is that moment when individual single-family-dwelling rooftops reach solar energy turnaround point (when the People® start selling energy back to the grid) and BigAss Solar suddenly corrals every public official into the Nope, no Mas Dinero policy.
So NYT, an article on clean energy taking off followed by an article on “environmental groups” threatening to sue to block offshore wind farms. Both sides!
Renewable energy is a land of contrasts.
We know some of the players in that little Jersey beach blanket babylon. The ones who managed (thru data!) to get the planned wind farms moved away from the offshore migratory bird routes. They are Jerseyans too, and just shake their heads about the whole NIMBY-pretending-wildlife-protection squad.
I watch some of that stupid video. Cartoon Douglass said that the Funders knew that slavery was wrong. There were no founders from South Carolina and Georgia?
Cartoon Douglass is being recognized more and more as being full of shit.
I like the substitution of Funders for Founders, whether you meant to or not.
Well, I think several of them were from Virginia.
I am reading Carol Anderson's Second, about the racial history of the right to bear arms, and she wrote that South Carolina and Georgia were actually worse. That stupid video claimed that the Founders believed that slavery would eventually disappear. I wonder if Prager has read Douglass' thoughts on American Christianity and the Fourth of July.
Periodic reminder that Georgia was founded by people who did *not* want slavery to begin with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Experiment
"founded by people" some of whom
I think it likely that some of the founders did think slavery would disappear eventually. That was before some of Eli Whitney's slaves invented the cotton gin and made slavery pay
True, but those people from SC and GA really liked slavery.
Some of them did know that slavery was wrong but also didn't want to discommode the one's that benefitted from it and lose their votes for the new Constitution. That's why they set the date for a possible end to the slave trade 20 years in the future.
Well, see, there were these guys just standing around the South, not doing anything, who knows how they got there, but white landowners came along and offered them employment opportunities. And then about 1865 they realized what they had been doing was wrong and stopped it! And no PoC has ever had a problem anywhere in the Southeast US since.
Finally! One of these with a happy ending! Thanks, Roy!
"And the city of Cartoon Philadelphia was burned to the ground, and nothing was ever built there again."
Fully expecting to see pictures of Maui shared as Minneapolis.
I'm surprised they haven't tried to blame Maui on BLM.
Right now, the directed-energy weapons are getting all the blame.
Somewhere a right-wing influencer does that weighing-two-things-with-your-hands gesture: "Blame it on the Jews, blame it on the blacks... tough call."
Respectfully: 'Clarence, youʼre a crook!' would be terser and puts the two 'k' sounds closer to each other, and I gather that 'k' sounds are for humour as fissile materials are for chain-reactions, which is why 'K.K.K.' is the funniest word in English, I guess.