Tuesday, February 4th, 2020
Eoin Higgins , Staff Writer - Common Dreams
Stephan: I am seeing more and more commentary basically telling the same story as is reported in this article. Also supporting this, as I watched various cable news networks and listened as reporters interviewed people at the Iowa caucuses over and over people talked about their fear about what was happening in America and their passionate desire above all else to get rid of criminal Trump.
Nearly 75% of Americans are dissatisfied with U.S. democracy, a new study has found.
Credit: Shutterstock
More Americans are dissatisfied with democracy than at any point since records began in 1995, according to a new study published Wednesday, and the number of citizens with a positive view of the U.S. system of government dipped for the first time below 50%. (emphasis added)
To observers like journalist Rania Khalek, the reason for such a shift in global attitudes was clear.
“Our systems aren’t actually democratic,” said Khalek. “We live in a miserable oligarchy, no wonder people are unhappy.”
A majority of people around the world—57.5%—are dissatisfied with democracy, the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Democracy study (pdf) found.
“If confidence in democracy has been slipping, it is because democratic institutions have been seen failing to address some of the major crises of our era, from economic crashes to the threat of global warming,” said study lead author Dr Roberto Foa.
According to the study, Americans’ dissatisfaction with democracy has been on the rise since the financial crisis […]
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Tuesday, February 4th, 2020
Heather Long , - The Washington Post
Stephan: Here is a remarkable report on Sanna Marin, Prime Minister of Finland. I think she is correct. Under criminal Trump we have devolved into an autocratic kleptocracy.
Sanna Marin, Prime Minister of Finland, participates in a panel session during the 50th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 23, 2020.
Credit: Alessandro Della Valle/EPA.
Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin is a big believer in the “American Dream,” and she thinks it’s a lot easier to achieve right now in her country than in the United States.
“I feel that the American Dream can be achieved best in the Nordic countries, where every child, no matter their background or the background of their families, can become anything,” Marin told The Washington Post in an interview on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland last month.
“We feel that the Nordic model is a success story,” said Marin, who became prime minister in December at age 34, making her briefly the youngest world leader (she lost that title in January when 33-year-old Sebastian […]
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Tuesday, February 4th, 2020
Andy Corbley, - Good News Network
Stephan: Here is some lovely good news, and a wonderful example of what one committed person can accomplish. I say bravo to this young man.
Boyan Slat
Boyan Slat is the young engineer responsible for the organization that recently collected two shipping containers of trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for the first time in history—and now, the Dutch conservationist is setting his sights on the very source of most of that water pollution.
Slat already has his oceanic cleanup vessels deployed along the path of key ocean currents, allowing vast amounts of plastic waste to drive themselves toward his devices before being hoovered up and moved to shore for recycling. He has also confirmed they are capturing even microplastics that are one millimeter in size.
But, simultaneously, he is also tackling a related issue—a facet that is just as critical to the overall plastic pollution problem: the world’s most littered rivers.
Slat and his organization, The Ocean Cleanup, began targeting river pollution after their research revealed that 1,000 of the world’s rivers are responsible for depositing 80% of all the trash that is currently swirling in the ocean.
By “turning […]
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Monday, February 3rd, 2020
MATT CHARNOCK, Reporter - San Francisco Chronicle
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.
