Monday, February 3rd, 2020
Stephan: Almost every day I read some research study or general media report detailing how humans because of stupidity and greed are destroying the space ship in which they live -- in not on. Here is today's latest report.
The 2020 election is going to determine how the game goes. Trump and the Trumplicans must be voted out of office. Personally, my preferred ticket is Sanders and Warren, but also the replacement by Democrats of the 21 Trumplican senators up for election, as well as the preservation by Democrats of the 12 seats they hold that are up for election.
I know that Trumplicans will see this as a politically partisan statement. They are wrong. It is not. I care only about one thing, fostering wellbeing individually and socially. I despise Trumplicans because nothing they do does that. Everything they do is about fostering Neo-feudalism, defined by greed and the pre-eminence of profit, christofascism, willful ignorance, and wealth inequality.
We have a two-party system, voting for third party candidate is voting for the Trumplican in that race. If you want your children and grandchildren to have a quality of life anything like yours you had better get clear that the candidate that does the best to foster wellbeing is really your only option. As flawed as the Democrats may be, they are consistently the party most in support of individual and societal wellbeing.
Dungeness crabs
Credit: KLCC
San Franciscans fawn over Dungeness crab. Cracking their carapaces and dunking the retrieved meat into melted butter, consuming these crustaceans is a local right of passage. But if our oceans continue to acidify, that bit of ceremony could go the way of Friday nights once spent at Blockbusters.
In a recent peer-reviewed, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-funded study published in Science of the Total Environment, populations of our beloved crustacean in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia were found to have shell damaged linked to an increasingly acidic Pacific. Though solely observed in the above-mentioned areas, it’s no feat of imagination to believe the same couldn’t happen (or is already happening) off our own ocean fronts.