Texas, Sports and the NAACP

Steven Guccione

Ok, one more Texas bashing article. How bad is it when the NAACP makes this sort of statement? Perhaps related, here in Austin there were a couple of anti-Semitic banners hung over the highway near the Jewish Community center. Police did nothing (I didn’t know not was legal to hang banners over a highway). Last night there was an attempted arson at the JCC.

NAACP Urges Professional Athletes In Free Agency to Avoid Texas

The Big Question

Steven Guccione

The big question I have about the right wing of American politics is: what do they actually want? We know they want to be in charge, but what happens after that? It is disturbing and telling that in the most recent 2020 presidential election the Republican party would not even produce a platform. I suppose the old jibe that something always beats nothing could be true here, but I suspect there is a set of policies that, frankly, would lose elections if they were voiced. Now the push is toward violent takeover of our democracy.

Almost one in three of Republicans say violence may be necessary to ‘save’ US

The billionaires are angry

Steven Guccione

These are staggering, obscene levels of accumulated wealth. My biggest problem with this isn’t some vague notion of “inequality”. The real problem is the concentration of (political) power. This is making our democracy all but obsolete. Robert Reich notes that the average American would have to work 800,000 years to earn as much as Elon Musk made in one day this year, all of it untaxable. How are we any different from post-Soviet Russia and their “oligarchs”? Is this really where we want to be as a country? BTW, my solution isn’t to target “the billionaires”, but to fix the tax system that allowed this to happen. If you want to claw back gains made during the previous era, that is a totally different problem.

The billionaires are angry

The Transition to Renewable Energy

Steven Guccione

I have always suspected that the transition away from fossil fuels to renewables like wind and solar could happen very quickly, once a critical price juncture is passed. Solar and wind are currently cheaper than oil and gas and the recent price spikes in oil and gas make an even better case for renewables. Nobody ever buys the more expensive option. I’ve never heard a legitimate argument for a slow transition away from oil and gas. I wonder how gradual the transition was from whale oil to petroleum for lamps in the 1800s? We are really fortunate that cheap alternates to fossil fuels have come along just as climate change is becoming a serious problem. If only we could get our tax dollars to stop subsidizing this dying industry.

Is there an “energy crisis”? Not really — fossil fuels are collapsing, and it’s high time