Ferris Jabr / Brendan George Ko , Contributing Writer / Visual Story Teller - The New York Times Magazine
Stephan: Here is a beautiful story of life and consciousness of the forest. The more science learns about the biosphere the clearer it becomes that all life is interconnected and interdependent. Only our greed blocks us from seeing what is obvious. If you support the fostering of wellbeing at every level everything becomes so much easier to understand.
As a child, Suzanne Simard often roamed Canada’s old-growth forests with her siblings, building forts from fallen branches, foraging mushrooms and huckleberries and occasionally eating handfuls of dirt (she liked the taste). Her grandfather and uncles, meanwhile, worked nearby as horse loggers, using low-impact methods to selectively harvest cedar, Douglas fir and white pine. They took so few trees that Simard never noticed much of a difference. The forest seemed ageless and infinite, pillared with conifers, jeweled with raindrops and brimming with ferns and fairy bells. She experienced it as “nature in the raw” — a mythic realm, perfect as it was. When she began attending the University of British Columbia, she was elated to discover forestry: an entire field of science devoted to her beloved domain. It seemed like the natural choice.
By the time she was in grad school at Oregon State University, however, Simard understood that commercial clearcutting had largely superseded the sustainable logging practices of the past. Loggers were replacing diverse forests with homogeneous plantations, evenly spaced in upturned soil stripped of most underbrush. Without any competitors, […]
Lisa Mascaro and Andrew Taylor, Staff Writers - Tampa Bay Times/ Associated Press
Stephan: One single corrupt senator, recently re-elected by Kentuckians who, given the state's social outcome data, one would think would know better, but apparently not, whose track record for his state ought to be a personal humiliation is now hanging up government relief desperately needed by tens of millions of Americans all over the country.
The reality is the United States no longer has a functioning two-party system, and no one exemplifies this more clearly than Mitch McConnell. The fact that this is happening yet is not producing a national outcry by those millions tells us more about our country than I think most of us want to know.
WASHINGTON — An emerging $900 billion COVID-19 aid package from a bipartisan group of lawmakers all but collapsed Thursday after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Republican senators won’t support $160 billion in state and local funds as part of a potential trade-off in the deal.
McConnell’s staff conveyed to top negotiators that the GOP leader sees no path to an agreement on a key aspect of the lawmakers’ existing proposal — a slimmed-down version of the liability shield he is seeking for companies and organizations facing potential COVID-19 lawsuits — in exchange for the state and local funds that Democrats want.
The GOP leader criticized “controversial state bailouts” during a speech in the Senate, as he insists on a more targeted aid package.
The hardened stance from McConnell, who does not appear to have enough votes from his Republican majority for a far-reaching compromise, creates a new stalemate over the $900-billion-plus package, despite days of toiling by a bipartisan group of lawmakers to strike compromise.
Other legislative pile-ups now threaten Friday’s must-pass government funding bill. If it doesn’t clear Congress, that would trigger […]
Stephan: As a result of the neverending disinformation campaign waged by Trump, Fox, Breitbart, Limbaugh, and other propaganda operations run by the christofascist White supremacists a large percentage of Americans either think the Covid-19 Pandemic is a fraud, or that Bill Gates is trying to put microchips in your body to spy and control you, and refuse to wear masks or social distance. They also don't want to take any vaccine. I think getting the vaccine into everyone's arms is going to be a long tedious process that will take months.
The big takeaway from all this for me is that an appalling number of Americans are so poorly educated, that they are easily manipulated through their fears, hates, resentments, and racism.
Credit: Illustration by IStock
This past week, millions of Americans joined together in total defiance of all public health advice for another round of infecting and killing their loved ones, while ensuring that the nation’s medical professionals will face several more months of risky, grueling, emotionally draining labor trying to keep a country full of heedless jerks and credulous conspiracy-mongers alive.
Many doctors, nurses, and hospital staff are increasingly hopeless and disillusioned. Gone are the 7’oclock cheers and “Thank you essential workers” signs in every window. That fleeting solidarity has been replaced by a cold, selfish indifference to the staggering and seemingly pointless sacrifices these heroic workers continue to make on our behalf. And many of them are wondering how much longer they can keep it up.
Never has this been more clear than it was over the long Thanksgiving weekend. While many Americans did the sensible — if heart-wrenching — thing and stayed home or limited their gatherings to small, pre-existing “pods,” more than a million people traveled through airports the day before Thanksgiving. In one poll, 40 percent […]
Stephan: This is the leverage point that is going to determine what survives about American democracy. Here are the facts: 126 Republican Representatives are traitors. The question is what is going to happen to them? My guess is nothing. And if that turns out to be the case then they get away with it, just as Trump is going to be pardoned, along with all the other scum around him. That means they will do it again since they have faced no consequences for their traitorous behavior.
Pascrell’s letter
Only one-third of the Republicans elected to Congress in 2020 will be seated in Congress come January if one New Jersey Democrat has his way.
Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ) argued on Friday that the 126 Republicans seeking to overturn election results should not be seated in Congress.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Friday joined the group seeking to overturn the election results in four states.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/index.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1337466661146828800&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rawstory.com%2F2020%2F12%2Fdemocrat-wants-to-use-civil-war-law-about-traitors-to-ban-126-republicans-from-being-seated-in-congress%2F&theme=light&widgetsVersion=ed20a2b%3A1601588405575&width=550pxTake advantage of our limited time offer. Go ad-free for just $2 a week. Support independent journalism.
Rep. Pascrell believes Section 3 of the 14th Amendment should be invoked to keep the Republicans from holding office.
“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the […]
Stephan: Right now, I think the biggest most important trend in the United States, other than the failure to deal with climate change, is that we no longer have a functioning two-party system, the form of governance we have had since the 1790s. It was not what the Founders had intended, but political controversies caused the system to develop and it has prevailed until it began to unravel during the Nixon years, and became a crisis over the past five years.
Now as this essay describes this is what is left of the Republican Party.
2020. Grand Rapids, Michigan. USA. President Donald Trump’s last rally before the 2020 Election on November 3, 2020. Grand Rapids was also the site of his final rally in the 2016 election.
If you were dropped in from another country without knowing anything about the United States and surveyed our current political moment, what would you conclude about the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement it represents? As 2020 comes to an end, what is conservatism about?
After nearly four years of Donald Trump’s presidency in which no misdeed was too vulgar or corrupt for conservatives to defend, now culminating in an outright war against democracy itself, you might be tempted to answer, “Nothing.” Though that’s not quite true, the real answer is not much more encouraging.
Some years ago, I wrote a book arguing that Democrats should learn from the things Republicans did well. One of these was that the GOP had a simple foundation of shared beliefs that could be easily communicated to voters. Ask a Republican running for any office from dogcatcher all the way […]
