Recent Comments

1. 1 day ago on Nick Anderson

   And so few people are willing to make any significant lifestyle changes in order to reduce their impact (or to stop funding companies that are so clearly evil). The “best” that most people are willing to do is to buy moderately less harmful products – by, say, replacing their ICE vehicle with an EV rather than striving to walk, bike, or take public transit as their primary means of transportation. So even though renewable energy is growing at a remarkable rate, it isn’t enough to compensate for the increase in energy demand, and we continue to increase our use of fossil fuels.

2. 1 day ago on Chris Britt

   It’s pretty effective on the vast majority of the population. How many people are unwilling to make any effort to reduce the amount that they drive, even though the environmental harm of our car-centric culture is so readily apparent? How many people are unwilling to reduce their consumption of animal products, even though the environmental impact of factory farming is so high and the animals are so maltreated? How many people regularly eat fast food, despite the incredible waste involved and the detriment to their own health? How many people are consumed by an insatiable desire to accumulate ever more stuff?

3. 8 days ago on Clay Bennett

   On the positive side, the majority of posters here do acknowledge that climate change is a genuine crisis and is human-caused. Yet I’d be willing to bet that the majority of those folks haven’t bothered to make even the simplest lifestyle changes, such as minimizing driving, flying, and meat consumption (let alone eliminating such things altogether). When you mindlessly buy into our consumer culture, you’re voting with your wallet in favor of the status quo and telling both corporations and elected officials that you don’t care enough about the issue to allow it to affect your daily decisions.

   If you believe that climate change is real and is human-caused, STOP LIVING UNSUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLES.

4. 8 days ago on Brian McFadden

   Greed among the wealthiest is a far bigger problem than the population. The wealthiest billion account for more pollution than the other 7 billion combined. And as far as carbon emissions, over 2/3 of the accumulated human-caused carbon in the atmosphere was spewed there by the U.S. and the E.U.

5. 9 days ago on The Other Coast

   One of many reasons why the AKC is an evil organization.

6. 13 days ago on Jeff Danziger

   Thank you. Even if we don’t destroy ourselves, the population issue is resolving itself – TFR has dropped before TRR in much of the world, and the most reliable predictors/causes of declining TFR are decreased child mortality and educational opportunities for girls and women. When a person doesn’t need to have a lot of kids to ensure that some of them survive to adulthood, and when the women have some voice in the number of children that they have, the birthrate plummets.

   Our real problem, of course, is the rampant consumption by those in “First World” countries – resource depletion and pollution and waste generation by the richest 1 billion far exceeds that of the other 7 billion.

7. 15 days ago on The Other Coast

   You left out the third leading killer of birds – automobiles.

8. 15 days ago on Phil Hands

   I can name quite a few Presidents that did not support Israel – Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson….

   But your points are definitely valid. Biden’s lack of popularity has little merit – he’s done a solid job in an exceedingly challenging situation. The Repugnants throw an endless barrage of unfounded criticism at him; if 10% resonates, then that’s enough to mar people’s views of him.

9. 18 days ago on The Duplex

   At least they produce much less CO2 per person than the U.S. AND a substantial amount of the pollution that they generate is essentially pollution that we’ve exported – if an American company manufactures their goods in China because China’s emissions regulations are less stringent than those in the U.S., and sells those goods to Americans, then that pollution should be considered to be America’s. AND we hardly have room to criticize them for their emissions given that they’re merely catching up to us on the technology curve and the worst of their polluting is no different than what we were doing in the recent past AND given that they’re making a far more concerted effort to clean up their act than we are.

10. 20 days ago on Matt Davies

    In 1990, Castro made an effort to reduce domestic discontent by allowing a large number of refugees to flee Cuba. The U.S. accepted those refugees, and doing so did cause major logistic problems in South Florida. However, even though the size of Miami’s workforce swelled by 7 to 8% in a 6-month period, the sudden influx had almost no impact on wages or unemployment rates (non-Hispanic men w/o high school degrees and between the ages of 25 & 59 did see their wages drop, but that group was comprised of only 17 people). One of U.S. history’s most massive and sudden influxes of immigrants into a single city did not harm workers in that city.

    When numbers of undocumented immigrants go down, it does not increase job opportunities for citizens – much of the work that they would have undertaken is either done by machines (chiefly in the case of agriculture) or simply isn’t done at all – fruit and vegetables are left to rot, domestic work is handled by a home’s residents themselves, small businesses simply do not get established, etc.

    Every time we’ve boosted immigration numbers, our economy has benefited. Most of the greatest advances in human history have taken place when there has been a melding of cultures.

    40% of U.S. counties lost population in 2023, and this is a decrease from 2022, when almost half (48%) of U.S. counties lost population. Granted, most such counties are suffering from rural flight, but many “Rust Belt” cities are in dire need of an influx of population.

    We do have genuine immigration problems. One is that we have not devoted enough resources to properly and systematically handling immigration. Another is that we have devoted significant resources to demonizing immigrants and hunting down undocumented people who have been having zero adverse impact. But as far as the question of quantity, the problem is that we are accepting too few, not that too many are coming in.