Wednesday, February 21st, 2018
Zacc Ritter, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: I am getting more and more emails from non U.S. readers warning me that the stature of the United States in their country is dissipating like a morning fog. It is a diminishment with profound geopolitical implications. Here is the data.
After Donald Trump’s election, U.S. allies and adversaries scrambled to evaluate whether his unorthodox rhetoric foreshadowed substantive shifts in U.S. foreign policy. The “America First” agenda raised questions about his administration’s willingness to defend and promote the liberal world order that the U.S. had instrumentally shaped since 1945.
Reflecting this uncertainty, the median approval rating of U.S. leadership fell from 48% in 2016 to a record-low 30% in 2017. To understand where the sharpest declines occurred, we examined salient country-level attributes often associated with key U.S. strategic partners. The most significant declines in U.S. leadership approval occurred in freer nations connected to the U.S. through a dense network of political and economic ties.
Fraying the Ties That Bind
Residents of allied nations (those that have formal alliances with the U.S.) are less likely to approve of U.S. leadership under Trump than are those in non-allied nations (36.8% and 48.1%, respectively). The opposite was true in 2016, when 63.5% of residents from allied nations approved of U.S. leadership, compared with 53.9% from non-allied countries.
This drop suggests Trump’s transactional style and rhetoric — for […]
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Wednesday, February 21st, 2018
Jim Norman, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: You saw the previous survey, now here is what Americans think is going on. How can this be you ask? Perhaps because 64% of Americans have never been in another country they have no way to realize what is actually going on in the rest of the world. Or perhaps it is because we now have one of the developed world's strongest disinformation and propaganda operations in the alt-right fascist media. Whatever the reason this disconnect from reality is consequential with long ranging consequences.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Forty-five percent of Americans are satisfied with the position of the United States in the world, a 13-year high and a 13-percentage-point increase from one year ago, just after President Donald Trump took office. The public is also more likely than it was a year ago to think the U.S. rates favorably in the eyes of the rest of the world.
At the same time, however, Gallup sees no change in Americans’ opinions of how other world leaders view Trump. Only 29% say he is respected, the same as a year ago.
The trends in these three measures of how Americans assess the United States’ place in the world have each followed different paths since 2016, the final full year of Barack Obama’s presidency.
- The belief that leaders of other countries respect the U.S. president dove from 45% in Obama’s final year to 29% last year, and has not recovered at all.
- The percentage of Americans satisfied with the nation’s position in the world dipped slightly from 36% in 2016 to 32% in 2017, but then surged […]
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Tuesday, February 20th, 2018
Stephan: We are just at the beginning of what I think is going to be one of the dominant trends of the 21st century, I am speaking here of migrations, particularly migrations due to either too much water or not enough water.
Migration estimates in the research papers suggest that if carbon emissions cause 4°C of warming as many as 760 million people will be on the move. As this report makes clear, just in terms of water, the logistics of dealing with these migrations is going to be an extraordinary challenge without massive social disruption.
Water is just the beginning, to it we must add food, medical care, sanitation, birth, and death. Here's the story of where we stand at the moment. It is going to get much much worse.
The U.S. environmental and disaster response policies currently in place are completely inadequate to the tasks they will face, and we are going to be left negligently unprepared.
As a result unless a culture recognizes that we are all in it together the racial tribal problems that are bad now are going to get much worse. Creating further social disruption.
Wake up America. Vote. And Vote Democratic. It is not that the Democrats are right, or not themselves overly corrupted. But Trump is the alternative. And if you don't think there has been no difference between Obama and Trump then we live in different worlds.
Water Refugee kids
Credit: Randall Hackley
Behind barbed-wire fences at this camp in northern Jordan, about 33,000 Syrians—half of them children—exist uneasily, housed in rows of rudimentary shelters that barely protect them from the winter cold.
Drinking water must be brought in daily by dozens of tanker trucks or pumped from desert boreholes that overexploit Jordan’s largest groundwater basin.
As in Jordan, the world’s refugee crisis, which is intimately linked with water availability both in the homelands that people escape and in the camps where they find shelter, is large and growing. Some 66 million people—a France-sized population—are displaced.
An estimated 28,300 refugees a day across the globe flee conflict and persecution, the relief agency UNHCR said. Fifty-five percent come from just three countries: Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Syria, which the World Bank says has endured the largest refugee crisis since World War II with more than half the country’s pre-war population having left their homes since 2011.
Now, with many Syrians in their seventh winter of displacement, hosting and supporting 650,000 registered refugees costs the […]
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Tuesday, February 20th, 2018
ELEANOR IMSTER, Lead Editor - EarthSky/NASA
Stephan: Part of what will be causing enormous mass movements of people is the rising sea level. And guess what? Sea rise is accelerating. Here's the latest data.
The full study can be be found at: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/new-study-finds-sea-level-rise-accelerating
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is at risk from rising sea levels. Credit: Dave/Flickr Creative Commons
A new study says that global sea level rise is accelerating incrementally over time, rather than increasing at a steady rate, as previously thought. The study, published February 12, 2018, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is based on 25 years of NASA and European satellite data.
The researchers say that this acceleration – driven mainly by increased melting in Greenland and Antarctica – has the potential to double the total sea level rise projected by 2100, when compared to projections that assume a constant rate of sea level rise.
If the rate of ocean rise continues to change at this pace, the researchers suggest, sea level will rise 26 inches (65 centimeters) by 2100. That’s enough to cause significant problems for coastal cities.
Steve Nerem, the study’s lead author, is a professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, a fellow at Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), […]
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Tuesday, February 20th, 2018
Ziva Branstetter, - Center for Investigative Reporting
Stephan: Sheriffs are the only elected law officers in the U.S. The post is a hangover from feudal England, and in my view should be entirely eliminated. Some sheriffs are competent wellbeing oriented individuals. But a disproportionate number are christofascist authoritarians, and the trend is they are getting worse. You can see this most clearly of course in Republican governed states. Here is Oklahoma for example.
Credit: BlackMattersUS.com
A newly expanded federal lawsuit seeks class-action status for thousands of Oklahoma residents it says are being extorted by a collections company working for most of the state’s sheriffs and courts.
If successful, the suit could impose sweeping changes on how the state – which ranks No. 1 in locking up women and No. 2 in locking up men – operates and pays for its justice system.
An investigation in September by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and The Frontier, an Oklahoma-based news site, examined the state’s high female incarceration rate.
The federal lawsuit over court debt-collection practices, originally filed late last year in the Northern District of Oklahoma, took on new importance last week when attorneys filed a motion for class-action status and two prominent legal groups joined the case.
The suit names sheriffs in 54 counties, judges and court officials along with Oklahoma-based Aberdeen Enterprizes II. The private, for-profit company contracts with the sheriffs to collect unpaid court fines and fees owed by people charged with traffic offenses, misdemeanors and felonies.
The suit claims that the company […]
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