Kent Pitman

Jamaicans Have Been Turning to Solar Power. It Paid Off After the Storm.

"Rooftop solar is spreading fast in Jamaica, and people with panels got their power back almost immediately. The ‘entire neighborhood benefits,’ one resident said."

"... In o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶ democracies, interviewers don't tolerate that."

#FTFY

Well and clearly said.

Excellent framing by John Fugelsang!!

My lay understanding is that a antitrust law forbids "dumping", though open source has always been a weird exception no one has tried to reconcile. Plus the whole notion of "regulation" across nations, especially sparring ones, is messy. So, possibly an effective strategy, yeah.

A subtext of a lot of writing is that stupid is a kind of authenticity, or at least stubborn and defiant is, and it's possible voters may prefer that to the antiseptic polish on a career politician, but it doesn't mean anyone covering it is obliged to overlook what is in a best-case-scenario stupid.

We're...gonna have to make future presidents sign a lease and put down a deposit.

It's a metaphor for his degree of care about democracy, public health, and climate. Just roadkill on his path to self-aggrandizement.

"When I see the shattered White House it reminds me of what bin Laden did — minus the mass murder"

Don't subtract that. He's transferred funds from tasks that save lives to selfish caprice. Willful action intentionally teeing up foreseeable mass death for personal ends. Murder, by any other name...

Smashing things to claim more power The destruction of the White House enrages me.

“Trump wants to destroy a symbol of restraint, dignity and honor that doesn’t belong to him. He is obliterating something to achieve a political objective. He wants to smash things because smashing things is his route to his claiming more power.”

steveschmidt.substack.com/p/smashing-t...

I would posit that the reason so many people are shocked by the image of the White House being demolished is because it shows that Trump views it 1) entirely as his property and 2) that he doesn't really expect anybody else to live there.

The GOP Congress needs to realize a dictator needs no Congress, as he'll insist they just rubber stamp him anyway, but they retain right to remove him. They think it's job security to back a rogue king, but it's not.

As to whether anyone sees this, I don't know. They all seem oblivious.

There's a kind of codependency here, with the leaders justifying themselves as just fulfilling the bloodlust of sycophants they've surrounded themselves with, alleging they are a representative sample, and the followers seeking to blindly do any sociopathic thing these leaders ask. It's a bad cycle.

Jokes are WAY less funny when easily confusable with the truth, not even to mention when told in a volatile situation full of zealots eager to please their leaders by rushing to blindly fulfill the implicit asks of the "jokes" (i.e., deniability-cloaked seditious conspiracy & stochastic terrorism).

Congrats on hitting this milestone in an amazing public service.

News agencies hide much sin, bias, laziness & incompetence behind quest for neutrality. But this isn't hard, blurry, or a slippery slope. It's PREPOSTEROUS to say POTUS is operating in an appropriate way. Congress not impeaching is breach if sworn oath & active conspiracy. News media must say so.

I used to think it was horrifying that little kids had to do active shooter drills. Do they now also rehearse being hauled off by the government and sold as slave labor. Or is that supposed to be a surprise?

To underscore this, revisit it in context of recent reports that they may be placing unmarked guardsmen within the crowds. Why might they? How could it be useful to them? I think we know, and the answer isn't that they want to peacefully talk down crowds by being buddies within.

the story of 2024-2025 in a nutshell:

"shit sucks, let's give this trump guy another chance"

"wait a minute, we hate donald trump!"

Love this. Superbly done. Please send this far and wide. @donwinslow.bsky.social

First we have to get to the place where we're out of it. That's not a foregone conclusion.

@chrislhayes.bsky.social @allinwithchris.bsky.social

OF COURSE it matters he lied in the election. Some active lying, some "strategic ignorance".

Candidates are sold to us like products. But politics has no consumer protection laws. Blatant fraud is fair game and, apparently, a winning strategy.

In all the commentary I've heard so far, no one has made plain the point that has been nagging at me:

Among the many he assembled to endure it, at least SOME must have heard: "Prepare to enter your own home town and be told to shoot at neighbors, perhaps your own family, as they are now The Enemy."

I can't believe how irresponsibly bad the "journalism" is that I see coming from #KatyTur. I had been away from TV awhile and tuned in to #MSNBC to hear her maligning Dems as saying just a lot of words.

Pro tip: When a lot is wrong, it takes "words" to say so. LISTEN. HELP EXPLAIN. (It's your job.)

Mergers thwart competition, though ironically they are sold to politicians under the guise of competitive advantage. "My competition is big, so I must be." It's an arms race, like the nuclear arms race, where such arguments make sense only if you accept the premise that the race itself makes sense.

It's also easy to sell the public on the idea that it's arbitrary to have a maximum size on something like a business. And yet competition cannot occur unless there is a maximum size, at least percentage-wise, in the market. Change, evolution, improvement grow out of such competition.

Those who would like to disassemble democracy have figured out that the single word "efficiency" is a palatable undesirable sounding thing that people will allow as a password in order to permit centralization. The idea that INefficiency can be a positive is a VERY hard sell, but a necessary truth.

I would say it even more generally than that. Centralization is a threat to democracy. It creates a single point of failure along whatever access is trying to be centralized. The historical design of the US is decentralized.

So it's official. Trump is enthusiastically using the powers of the state to target his political enemies. There's a word for that. The MSM can either enable him by not using it, or can speak the truth. Which will it be?

It's weird how Tylenol caused autism (first diagnosed in 1943) before it was even invented (1955). What a clever drug.