Friday, September 7th, 2018
NICOLE KARLIS, News Writer - Salon
Stephan: I have been telling you for a long time that I think the White supremacist movement that has arisen throughout the world, but is particularly acute in the United States, given our history, is driven by fear and despair. What I had not appreciated is that this kind of passionate grievance is a lethal worldview to those who hold it. Here is the story.
arisen. Notice they are all White.
Credit: AP/Evan Vucci
The 2016 election brought to light a cohort of Americans whom activist Michael Moore tried to warn the country about before the 2016 presidential election.
“From Green Bay to Pittsburgh, this, my friends, is the middle of England – broken, depressed, struggling – the smokestacks strewn across the countryside with the carcass of what we use to call the Middle Class,” Moore wrote in his viral article “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win,” which compared Middle America to Brexit.
A new analysis by researchers at Columbia University, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine this week, has corroborated Moore’s theory about the men and women previous politicians have seemingly left behind.
According to the study, there is an alarming link between an increase in “despair deaths” – a term which describes deaths caused by drug overdoses, alcohol or suicide – and counties that voted for Trump. In other words, those who have been left behind — the ones who voted for Trump, because they presumably thought his presidency would […]
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Friday, September 7th, 2018
Stephan: Here is some more good news. It is fascinating to watch what Europe is doing ecologically while we have an administration and a party doing everything in their power to damage the U.S. environment.
The new Dam Removal Europe report calls on European governments to start removing the estimated 30,000 obsolete dams, weirs and sluices negatively impacting biodiversity and local economies across the continent.
Credit: Staffan Widstrand/Rewilding Europe
Dam Removal: A viable solution for the future of our European Rivers stresses that the density of dams, weirs and locks in Europe is far higher than previously suspected, with salmon, eel, sturgeon and other migratory fish encountering obstacles every kilometre on average. Previously, only dams higher than 10 metres were counted, but these represent less than 3 percent of all river barriers.
“Rivers are nature’s lifeline, and disrupting them comes at a high price. Dams have played a critical role in Europe’s development but they have also contributed to the slow death of our rivers and the catastrophic decline in freshwater species,” said Stuart Orr, Freshwater Practice Lead for WWF. “Tens of thousands of small dams and barriers are no longer in use but they are still in place: blocking fish migrations, stopping the flow of sediment […]
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Thursday, September 6th, 2018
Stephan: I have been telling my readers for years that The Wellness Theorem dictates that those social policies that are the most compassionate, life-affirming and fostering of wellbeing are also more efficient, more productive, easier to implement, more pleasant to live under and much, much cheaper. The social outcome data is very clear about this, and here is an example.
Credit: Shutterstock
$26 trillion by 2030.
That, according to the most authoritative research to date, is the amount of money humanity could save through a global shift to sustainable development.
It’s a lot of money. Before you break your brain trying to imagine it, just pause to make a note that it’s a positive sum (uh, extremely positive), not negative. Net savings, not costs.
That might come as a surprise since decades of conservative and fossil fuel propaganda have made it conventional wisdom that cleaning up our act is expensive — that it costs more than the status quo. It is the argument hauled out against every single pollution regulation.
The argument has always been false on a sufficiently long time scale. Sooner or later, humanity must live sustainably or it won’t go on living — that’s what “sustainable” means. And any fundamental shift toward sustainability is enjoyed by all subsequent generations of humans, so, y’know, the value compounds. If there are any people left in the year 5000, the question of whether it was […]
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Thursday, September 6th, 2018
Stephan: In my view, we are at a stage of acute crisis in the United States, largely because the Republican Party has simply abandoned any sense of ethics, any commitment to put the interests of the country above party or personal interest. It all comes down to the voters in November. That's you, and the people you know.
Donald Trump
Ratified in 1967, the 25th Amendment to the Constitution allows the vice president and a majority of sitting Cabinet secretaries to remove the president if they decide he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Crafted in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, it’s been cited recently in response to President Donald Trump and mounting evidence that he’s not equipped to handle the office of the presidency. Excerpts from a new book on the Trump administration don’t just bolster that view; they suggest a White House where officials have all but invoked an informal version of that provision, stymieing presidential decision making and cutting Trump out of the policymaking and other affairs of state. The White House may be divided by competing loyalties and self-interest, but it is united in its belief that the president cannot be allowed to act unencumbered, lest he plunge the federal government—and the United States—into chaos.
In Fear: Trump in the White House, veteran reporter Bob Woodward portrays an […]
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Thursday, September 6th, 2018
JOSHUA EATON, - Think Progress
Stephan: Republicans cannot govern in a way the supports wellbeing, and they are not honest, as this report about a court decision lays out.
Representative Scott Taylor (R-VA) Credit: Bill Clark/CQ Rollcall
A judge in Richmond, Virginia found “out-and-out fraud” in ballot petition signatures that were submitted by the campaign staff for Republican incumbent Rep. Scott Taylor on behalf of left-leaning independent Shaun Brown.
Circuit Judge Gregory Rupe ordered Brown off the ballot at a hearing on Wednesday, after 377 signatures Taylor staffers gathered for Brown were tossed, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
It’s not clear whether Taylor or his staffers knew the submitted signatures were fraudulent.
Democrats and other political insiders suggested Taylor’s campaign wanted Brown on the ballot in an attempt to siphon votes away from Democrat Elaine Luria, who’s giving Taylor a tough re-election challenge. Though she ran as an independent this year, Brown has run for the same congressional seat as a Democrat in the past. Taylor has previously said he knew some of his campaign staffers were collecting signatures for Brown, but he denied it was to spoil the vote for Luria.
An attorney for Brown lashed out at the Virginia Democratic […]
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