Donald has pretty good speech-writers, but the giveaway is when he speaks out on his own or leaps out of bed and begins tweeting.
The word on the street is that we’re stuck with a president who really doesn’t know much about things, doesn’t read unless somehow forced to—and won’t admit that others might know more than he about one thing or another. But he tells us he’s a “genius” and has a superior IQ.
There’s evidence he worships wealth, has learned how to count money and how to avoid sharing it—and on the basis of little more than that, he appears to consider himself the measuring stick for humanity in general. There undoubtedly are many, many thousands of people with greater intelligence walking the streets of cities throughout America, and they aren’t wasting their time shouting to everyone about how great they are.
Yep, Donald’s the sharpest marble in the bag. I’ve found a few other expressions I like to apply to him. Such as “It’s hard to believe that he beat 100,000 other sperm.” Or “Sharp as a bag of wet mice.” Or “The gates are down, the lights are flashing, but the train isn’t coming.” I know he’s all hot to change the libel laws to muzzle criticism of his narcissistic quest for fame and glory, but he’s the head guy in charge of our well-being and very existence. As such he is open to critical inspection by such as me, The New York Times and everybody in between—no matter how many chose to vote him into office (which wasn’t a majority, which drives him nuts, and leaves him obsessed with destroying Hillary Clinton in the eyes of the public).
Does Donald really feel that the scientific determination of global warming is some sort of world-wide plot against industrial progress? Are the world’s scientists in cahoots, for some nefarious reason, with a poor and jealous segment of society? Is he really dumb as a post? Or is scientific reality to him merely an “inconvenient truth” to be brushed out of the way of progress toward an autocratic plutocracy?
Here are portions of a couple of real news stories on Jan. 28:
“Donald Trump has expressed doubts over the existence of climate change, as it is understood by the vast majority of scientists. After proclaiming his belief in ‘clean air and clean water,’ the U. S. President questioned some of the central tenets of climate science in an interview with Piers Morgan.
“'There is a cooling, and there’s a heating. I mean, look, it used to not be climate change, it used to be global warming. That wasn’t working too well because it was getting too cold all over the place’," Trump told British journalist Morgan in an interview for ITV News.
“'The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records. They’re at a record level’, Trump said.” (Just another lie born of ignorance and narcissism)
In December 2017, Donald dropped climate change from a list of threats to U.S. national security. For the winter of 2016 and 2017, arctic sea ice levels were at a record low and temperatures were at a record high, the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center reported last month. Trump has long expressed skepticism about global warming and global climate change. During record snowfalls in December 2017, the president questioned global warming on Twitter:
“In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record,” Trump wrote, “Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!"
As I keep countering on behalf of truth, “trillions of dollars” never were involved, or were about to be, in the Paris accord against global warning. That was a lie of major proportions. “Trillions” would indicate at least $2,000,000,000,000. The U. S. had chipped in $1 billion and pledged $2 billion more—a total of $3,000,000,000 into the global initiative. That shows U. S. financial involvement to actually be 1/666th (or less) than the “trillions” referred to by Donald. The reality: $3 billion, mere pennies compared to the hundreds of billions Donald’s tax cuts have dished out to polluting industries and high-income sorts such as himself and his children.
But who ever said he was either honest or intelligent?
Climate change refers to the altering of the world's climate caused by rise in carbon dioxide levels, often attributed to widespread use of fossil fuels. 2017 was the warmest year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The realities of global warming and climate change that one doesn’t learn haunting a golf course:
GLOBAL WARMING occurs when carbon dioxide (CO2) and other air pollutants and greenhouse gases collect in the atmosphere and absorb sunlight and solar radiation that have bounced off the earth’s surface. Normally, this radiation would escape into space—but these pollutants, which can last for years to centuries in the atmosphere, trap the heat and cause the planet to get hotter. That's what's known as the greenhouse effect.
In the United States, the burning of fossil fuels to make electricity is the largest source of heat-trapping pollution, producing about two billion tons of CO2 every year. Coal-burning power plants are by far the biggest polluters. The country’s second-largest source of carbon pollution is the transportation sector, which generates about 1.7 billion tons of CO2 emissions a year.
CLIMATE CHANGE: Scientists agree that the earth’s rising temperatures are fueling longer and hotter heat waves, more frequent droughts, heavier rainfall, and more powerful hurricanes. In 2015, for example, scientists said that an ongoing drought in California—the state’s worst water shortage in 1,200 years—had been intensified by 15 percent to 20 percent by global warming. They also said the odds of similar droughts happening in the future had roughly doubled over the past century. And in 2016, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine announced that it’s now possible to confidently attribute certain weather events, like some heat waves, directly to climate change.
The earth’s ocean temperatures are getting warmer, too—which means that tropical storms can pick up more energy. So global warming could turn, say, a category 3 storm into a more dangerous category 4 storm. In fact, scientists have found that the frequency of North Atlantic hurricanes has increased since the early 1980s, as well as the number of storms that reach categories 4 and 5. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina—the costliest hurricane in U.S. history—struck New Orleans; the second-costliest, Hurricane Sandy, hit the East Coast in 2012.
The impacts of global warming—and the climate change it effects—are being felt across the globe. Extreme heat waves have caused tens of thousands of deaths around the world in recent years. And in an alarming sign of events to come, Antarctica has been losing about 134 billion metric tons of ice per year since 2002. This rate could speed up if we keep burning fossil fuels at our current pace, some experts say, causing sea levels to rise several meters over the next 50 to 150 years.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said 2017 was the 21st-consecutive warmer-than-average year in the U.S., with the five warmest years since 1895 all occurring from 2006 to 2017. Additionally, temperatures have trended upward by an average of 0.15 degrees each decade in the U.S. since 1895, when records began. In 2017, the United States had its third-warmest year in 123 years of records.
No one’s making this up just to frustrate Donald Trump. It’s all killing people—some quickly, some slowly.
MEANWHILE, Donald’s tweets continue to come out of the wrong end of the bird. Like this middle-of-the-night one—just another out-and-out lie:
“@realDonaldTrump—Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech. 45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history. @FoxNews beat every other Network, for the first time ever, with 11.7 million people tuning in. Delivered from the heart!” —4:02 a.m., Feb. 1, 2018
Real-news sources hastened to point out: “But according to Nielsen, a global TV ratings research agency, the figure fell short of President Barack Obama's 2010 address to Congress, which was watched by 48 million. It was also down on President Bill Clinton's 1998 address, watched by 53.1 million, George W Bush's in 2002 (51.7 million) and again in 2003 (62.1 million).”
And don’t a lot of you wonder about such self-aggrandizing tweets in the middle of the night? My own conclusion is that we have the supposed “leader of the free world” whipping out one thing or another after being awakened from dreams of greatness by an aging prostate. And so turns the world. So is our fate determined.
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