KEVIN RUDD, Former Prime Minister of Australia and President of the Asia Society Policy Institute - Foreign Affairs
Stephan: This, in my opinion, is a brilliant geopolitical assessment by Kevin Rudd, the former Prime Minister of Australia. It is also an utter condemnation of Donald Trump. I urge you to read it.
The USS Porter fires a tomahawk land attack missile, April 2017
In January and February of this year, there was audible popping of champagne corks in certain quarters of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. What some observers had long seen as this era’s giant geopolitical bubble had finally begun to deflate. China’s Communist Party leadership, the thinking went, was at last coming apart, a result of its obsession with official secrecy, its initial missteps in responding to the novel coronavirus outbreak, and the unfolding economic carnage across the country.
Then, as China began to recover and the virus migrated to the West in March and April, irrational jubilation turned to irrational despair. The commentariat greeted with outrage any possibility that the pandemic might in fact help China emerge triumphant in the ongoing geopolitical contest with the United States. This concern was a product of China’s seemingly cunning remolding of the narrative on the origins of the virus, the brutal efficiency of the Chinese authoritarian model in containing it, and Beijing’s global COVID-aid campaign. China’s own nationalist commentariat happily piled on, […]
Stephan: Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the corporate oligarchs behind them are trying to play the entire nation with their political theater. Trump's Red Hats are the modern-day equivalent of Hitler's Brown Shirts, Mussolini's Black Shirts, and the democracy of the United States balances on a knife edge.
People hold signs and flags during a protest against measures aimed at slowing the spread of the new coronavirus Friday, May 1, 2020, in San Diego. Credit: AP Photo/Gregory Bull
Infamously, he called the white supremacist street marauders and other hooligans who rampaged through Charlottesville in 2017, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens of others, “very fine people.”
Donald Trump slurs and condemns black athletes who protest police brutality and other human rights violations as “sons of bitches.”
Trump is now praising his followers who at his treasonous command are “protesting” social distancing and stay-at-home public health rules, largely in states and cities led by Democratic mayors and governors.
There is nothing “very good” about these Trumpists and those in league with them who demand the end of rules designed to protect the American people […]
Stephan: The Republican cult does not like democracy and, knowing they are a minority, will do anything they can to cheat and skew an election outcome. You cannot be ethical and a Republican. That is not a partisan statement, it is just a statement of fact.
Please do the country a favor Coloradians and send this scum back to the sewer from which he came.
Colorado Republican Representative Ken Buck
Colorado Republican Party Chair Ken Buck, a U.S. representative from Windsor, pressured a local party official to submit incorrect election results to set the primary ballot for a state Senate seat, according to an audio recording of a conference call obtained by The Denver Post.
“You’ve got a sitting congressman, a sitting state party chair, who is trying to bully a volunteer — I’m a volunteer; I don’t get paid for this — into committing a crime,” Eli Bremer, the GOP chairman for state Senate District 10, told The Post on Wednesday, confirming the authenticity of the recording. “To say it’s damning is an understatement.”
Buck says he was merely asking Bremer to abide by a committee decision.
At issue is the Republican primary for the District 10 seat currently held by Sen. Owen Hill, who’s term-limited. State Rep. Larry Liston and GOP activist David Stiver both ran for it. To qualify for the November ballot via the caucus and assembly process, a candidate must receive 30% of the vote from Republicans within the district.
Nick Lavars, Writer - Wageningen University/New Atlas
Stephan: The research upon which this report is based was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Here is a really clear exposition, on an aspect of climate change many don't seem to consider. As I have been saying for years, in the United States we are going to have three big migrations. Away from coastlines because of sea rise, and temperature. Out of the Southwest because of lack of water and temperature. Out of the south-central states because of violent weather events, temperature, and a lack of water.
But as this research study makes clear it is going to be much bigger than that. This report concludes that by 2070, 3.5 billion humans will be in nearly unliveable conditions. You think they will just stay there? No, neither do I. The entire world including the United States is going to be stressed in ways the Covid-19 virus pandemic just hints at.
We are either going to grow up and awaken to the matrix of life, and figure out how to live within it in a way that fosters wellbeing, or hundreds of millions of us are going to die. Overpopulation, which used to obsess us is not going to be an issue, I predict. Migration is the issue.
A study forecasting global temperatures as a result of climate change has projected that billions will be made to endure “nearly unliveable” heat. Credit: stevanovicigor/Depositphotos
Climate change stands to reshape the world in all kinds of ways, and one of the most profound will be the impact of warmer temperatures on the human population. An international team of researchers casting an eye towards this future has published a study detailing a grim outlook for billions of people, with rapidly rising temperatures to leave them outside the “climate niche” where humans have thrived for thousands of years.
A lot of reports that investigate the oncoming effects of climate change do so with an 2 °C (3.6 °F) or 3 °C (5.4 °F) temperature increase in mind and project how such jumps in global average temperatures over pre-industrial levels could impact the world’s ecosystems, from the oceans to the mountains, and everything in between.
Climate change stands to reshape the world in all kinds of ways, and one of the most profound will be the impact of warmer temperatures on the human population. […]
The thing about life forms is they all mutate, and the simpler they are the quicker the mutation. All life form researchers know this, as do most people, if not in detail. It is, however, apparently above the capacity of Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, or rather they have different priorities. Everything that is happening to America was begun by the stress of the Covid-19 virus, but is the result of incompetence, greed, and the belief that you can outsmart facts for short term gain.
In a world of mutating viruses and bacteria, which is inevitable given climate change, to have a healthy society a country must have a universal birthright single-payer healthcare system run not for profit but to foster wellbeing. Our values are screwed up, and it has brought us to this, led by men like these.
A nurse looks at test tubes after taking a blood sample from a patient suffering from Covid 19, in the Covid-19 department at the Bari Polyclinic on May 05, 2020 in Bari, Italy. Credit: Donato Fasano/Getty
A new strain of the novel coronavirus appears to be more contagious than the version that gained footing at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
The new strain, dubbed D614G, surfaced in Europe in February before appearing in the east coast of the United States. It has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March, according to the report. That fact is raising concerns, not just over the new strain’s infectivity but also because some believe the existence of a secondary strain may make some patients vulnerable to a second infection after surviving a different strain.
Because much existing research was focused on earlier strains, such research may not be applicable to this new strain, Los Alamos scientists warn.
The 33-page report was posted on BioRxiv, and has yet to […]
