Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next presidential motorbike escorts will be going electric. Considering the fact that Russia is heavily dependent on its oil industry and has long been a barrier to faster climate action, this comes as a bit of a surprise, but that shows how much the electric revolution is crossing the world.
The Republican Party has won the popular vote in a presidential election only one time since 1988. That’s more than 30 years (or 7 elections) with just one popular vote win, which went to George W. Bush, possibly due to an Osama bin Laden video tape that came out 4 days before the election. In 2000, Bush won the electoral college (well, maybe*) despite the fact that Gore got more than half a million more votes. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, but lost the electoral college vote (by fewer than 60,000 votes in key states).
It’s a shame — you’ve got a poor economy almost completely dependent on one industry (the oil industry) that is controlled by corrupt oligarchs, and that country’s totally corrupt president is apparently running foreign policy for what is supposed to be the most powerful nation on earth. It’s like a privileged, educated 20-year-old with kind and thoughtful parents who has fallen under the spell (or control) of a nasty, corrupt, immoral, drug-addicted street thug.
I was on the verge of titling this “Let’s Be Honest — Fox News Viewers Are Idiots,” or perhaps “Let’s Be Honest — Trump Supporters Are Idiots,” but I thought I better take the high road and not do that. Happily, I think the new title is better and I didn’t offend anyone.
Last week, I wrote about a US democratic crisis. It concerns Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump on the surface, but a bit more deeply, it concerns oil. Take a deep breath and bear with me a moment while I set the stage before connecting the dots.
One of the key lessons I learned while getting my first degree in sociology is a simple one, but it’s also a profound one that is too often glossed over. The lesson is that democracy is fundamentally built on two pillars: 1) widespread availability of accurate, nearly complete information; and 2) a citizenry that engages in politics.
Donald Trump is not that normal, but he is human. He is a human who has lived essentially all of his life with a totally stacked hand, to bring in a gambling analogy. He has still managed to lose all of his or his companies’ cash several times, but then his connections in the benevolent and altruistic worlds of the mafia, luxury real estate, banking, and show business have bailed him out and let him start a fresh game with a new (again highly stacked) hand. As such, despite being human, The Donald has had a pretty abnormal life that has not fully warped his sense of reality by itself but which has warped his sense of what’s proper and normal for the rest of society. After all, his reality is indeed real, even if it’s not normal or proper.
Austria filed a legal complaint with the European Court of Justice on Thursday against the European Union’s approval for the expansion of the Paks Nuclear Power Plant in Hungary, which already currently meets 40% of the country’s electricity needs.
Tesla is growing. It is struggling with growing pains, but it’s still far and away the biggest corporate driver of the EV revolution. We can’t tease out corporate or government policies enough to make a list of things that wouldn’t exist if not for Tesla, but we know it’s a long and awe-inspiring list.
When you think of healthy democracies, you definitely think of petrostates, right? The question is, is the Republican Party treating the US as a petrostate?
