Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is some very relevant commentary from the late 18th and early 19th century from a father and son who each played a major in creating the society we call America. The state we are in is exactly what they feared. Donald Trump is exactly the monster they saw destroying democracy. That this is being published in a British not American newspaper I find telling in itself.
John Adams
The Presidents Adams, John and John Quincy, knew that the powerful in government were elitists, no matter what they called themselves.
There were those, like Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and many of their fellow southerners, who skillfully employed a rhetoric that concealed their class interests. There were those in the Adamses’ New England who dismissed all social inferiors without apology. The two Adamses may have been snobs in their own way but they hated all forms of deception and intimidation, subtle or direct, regardless of its origin. They hated the fact that American politics thrived on the embellishment of larger-than-life personalities as “men of the people”. To the endless frustration of the father and the son, each spent the greater part of his political career facing the charge of holding a dangerous degree of elitist sympathy. Whether guilty or not, they took a perverse pride in refusing to court public opinion through dishonest means – which made them poor politicians.
Nor were the Presidents Adams ever sanguine about the two-party system, […]
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Bill McKibben, - Rollingstone
Stephan: I am beginning to see more and more stories like this. I am less concerned about the details, rather what catches my attention is that serious people are really beginning to think about the long term consequences of climate change, and universally finding them catastrophic. As I talk about what is coming I find my friends and colleagues simply cannot comprehend the future, can't imagine the most probable reality.
The stubs of corn stalks that were chopped down because heat and lack of rain ruined the crop, litter a field in Nebraska. 2012 saw the highest recorded temperatures in American history. Over the summer most of the mid-west experienced a tremendous drought, where hot weather and the lack of rain destroyed crops and grazing land. In the high plains of Western Nebraska’s cattle lands, this created ideal conditions for wild fires, which spread across the land sparked by single bolts of lightning.
CreditAndrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/ Getty
Oh, it could get very bad.
In 2015, a study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology pointed out that if the world’s oceans kept warming, by 2100 they might become hot enough to “stop oxygen production by phyto-plankton by disrupting the process of photosynthesis.” Given that two-thirds of the Earth’s oxygen comes from phytoplankton, that would “likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.”
A year later, above the Arctic Circle, in Siberia, a heat wave thawed a reindeer carcass that had been […]
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Stephan: I listen to Republican politicians, Trump included, of course, talking about how great everything is going, and wonder are they willfully ignorant or are they just lying? With Trump I know it is both, but with senators I previously respected even if I did not agree with them, I am not sure.
What I want to see is whether Millennials turn out in vast numbers, as they should, or are too lazy and disaffected to vote. It can change the election outcome either way.
The global middle class is witnessing a historic hollowing out, with younger generations struggling to find their financial foothold in many wealthier countries around the world, including the U.S. Only 6 of 10 millennials earn enough to be considered middle class, compared with 7 of 10 baby boomers at the same age, according to a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The share of middle-class citizens is falling across developed nations, slipping from 64 percent of global households in the mid-1980s to 61 percent in the mid-2010s, the OECD said. Younger generations are bearing the brunt of the middle-class decline, with […]
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Saturday, April 13th, 2019
Stephan: In spite of everything the Congressional Republicans as well as Trump and his administration are doing to keep the carbon industries alive, the world, and even some U.S. states, are moving out of the carbon era, and that is very good news. Here is the latest
The full report is available
here and more highlights of key findings can be found
here.
Solar and wind farm
Credit: Stanford University
This exciting new international report shows that renewable energy now accounts for one-third of all global power capacity.
The decade-long trend of strong growth in renewable energy capacity continued in 2018 with global additions of 171 gigawatts, according to new data released by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) earlier this week.
The annual increase of 7.9%t was bolstered by new additions from solar and wind energy, which accounted for 84% of the growth.
IRENA’s annual Renewable Capacity Statistics 2019, the most comprehensive, up-to-date and accessible figures on renewable energy capacity, indicates growth in all regions of the world, although at varying speeds. While Asia accounted for 61% of total new renewable energy installations and grew installed renewables capacity by 11.4%, growth was fastest in Oceania with a 17.7% rise in 2018. Africa ranked in third place with 8.4% growth, and nearly two-thirds of all new power generation capacity added in 2018 was from renewables, led by emerging and developing economies.
Through its compelling business case, renewable energy has […]
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Saturday, April 13th, 2019
Lauren Kelley, Member of the Editorial Board - The New York Times
Stephan: I hear christofascists who are intent on controlling women and shoving subordination in their faces say the most amazingly stupid things about sex and sexuality. It is obvious that whether it is Donald Trump and his vulgar pussy grabbing machoism, or Mike Pence and his really creepy issues about women, or any number of Republicans at the federal and state level, that these men neither know nor care to know the most basic things about a woman's body, or what healthy sexuality is. This essay makes the case very clear.
Credit: Sophia Foster-Dimino/NYT
A few recent news stories have served as reminders that an awful lot of people lack even a basic understanding of the female body. And some of those people get to make and shape our laws.
There was the lawyer in Alabama who tried to justify an extreme anti-abortion bill that he helped draft by arguing that after a man and a woman have sex, “you can take her straight into a clinic and determine an egg and sperm came together.”
That’s not medically possible. Even the most sensitive pregnancy test won’t come back positive until an embryo is implanted in the uterus, which typically happens a week or more after fertilization. So the idea that any woman would be able to get an abortion within two weeks of fertilization — the cutoff under the Alabama bill — is preposterous.
Maybe not everyone learns the mechanics of early pregnancy in ninth-grade biology class. But it’s reasonable to expect that someone trying to legislate what pregnant people […]
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