Stephan: If you read me regularly you know I have been telling you since the 1990s that there would be three internal migrations in the United States: Away from the coasts because of sea rise, out of the Southwest because of lack of water, and rising temperatures, and out of the central states because of catastrophic weather events like tornadoes, and that not even a fraction of what needed to be done was being planned for.
Well, here is a story about the Southwest that confirms my predictions. Greater Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque are all doomed by the end of the century, and we still aren't doing anything substantive to prepare for this.
View of the downtown Phoenix, Arizona city skyline as seen from South Mountain Park Credit: Robyn Beck/AFP/ Getty
“There will come a day when the temperature won’t fall below 100 degrees in Phoenix during the nighttime,” Dr. Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University who wrote “Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City,” told Salon. “That will be a threshold of some kind.”
The American Southwest has long been a refuge for those seeking the health benefits of warm, dry air and sunny days. But too much of a good thing is not a good thing — for human health or for the natural ecosystem. Now, the Southwest is facing a reckoning: decades of human development, coupled with rising global temperatures as a result of carbon emissions, means that many major cities in the Southwest may become uninhabitable for humans this century.
The reason has to do with something called the Heat Island Effect, a concept that describes the effect in which the densely-populated, central parts of a city with lots of concrete and asphalt will have higher temperatures compared to […]
Stephan: How stupid is the Fox disinformation operation? How about finding it nefarious that the White House Press secretary actually does research to make sure she is giving a reporter an accurate answer? So different from the incompetent liars of the last administration.
Fox News host John Roberts on Tuesday suggested that White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had “nefarious” motives because she reportedly tried to research her answers before facing reporters on camera.
Roberts hosted a nearly 5-minute on-air discussion with conservative pundit Joe Concha about a Daily Beast report that claimed Psaki had asked reporters for their questions in advance of the briefing.
“This idea that the White House is inquiring of reporters what’s on their minds and maybe sort of what direction their questions are going in, how much of this do you think is nefarious and how much of this do you think is simply click-bait on the part of the Daily Beast?” Roberts wondered.Tired of ads? Want to support our progressive journalism? Click to learn more.
“This is the way things have always worked,” Concha admitted, “in terms of gaggles beforehand with the press secretary. Basically a way to have an informal conversation around where these correspondents’ heads are at in terms of topics.”
But Concha argued that Psaki was wrong to follow the tradition.
“Shouldn’t the press secretary be able to defend the policies and perspectives of the White House without […]
Stephan: In today's edition, I have chosen to run only a single story. I do this because I think it is very important that every American, and certainly all my readers, read this report, and absorb what it is saying. We came within a hairsbreadth of losing our democracy. I don't think that has fully sunk in for many yet, and it needs to if we are ever to find our way out of the darkness of the Trump years. Please read this, and pass it on to your friends and family. It is going to take the collective intention of all of us to get what needs to be done accomplished.
Jim Rutenberg, Jo Becker, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Matthew Rosenberg and Michael S. Schmidt, Reporters - The New York Times
Stephan: Lest you have any doubts that Donald Trump fomented insurrection, and deserves to be convicted in his second impeachment and then, in my opinion, tried and convicted in a court of law and sent to prison, this extraordinary act of investigative reporting should dispel them. Never since the Constitution Convention of 1787 has any sitting president behaved in this manner.
By Thursday the 12th of November, President Donald J. Trump’s election lawyers were concluding that the reality he faced was the inverse of the narrative he was promoting in his comments and on Twitter. There was no substantial evidence of election fraud, and there were nowhere near enough “irregularities” to reverse the outcome in the courts.
Mr. Trump did not, could not, win the election, not by “a lot” or even a little. His presidency would soon be over.
Allegations of Democratic malfeasance had disintegrated in embarrassing fashion. A supposed suitcase of illegal ballots in Detroit proved to be a box of camera equipment. “Dead voters” were turning up alive in television and newspaper interviews.
The week was coming to a particularly demoralizing close: In Arizona, the Trump lawyers were preparing to withdraw their main lawsuit as the state tally showed Joseph R. Biden Jr. leading by more than 10,000 votes, against the 191 ballots they had identified for challenge.
As he met with colleagues to discuss strategy, the president’s deputy campaign manager, Justin Clark, was urgently summoned to the Oval Office. […]
Stephan: The ICE detention centers -- a benign euphemism -- are a part of the American Gulag that doesn't get much media attention, and that many Americans don't even fully understand exists. It is a particularly morally culpable part of the gulag, where humans are held in detention for profit. Like the illness profit system it is a glaring example of the principal moral cancer confronting the country -- that the only social priority in the United States is profit.
South Texas Detention Complex, Pearsall, TX. Photograph: David Taylor
“Imagine how it feels there, locked up, the whole day without catching the air, without … seeing the light, because that is a cave there, in there you go crazy; without being able to see my family, just being able to listen to them on a phone and be able to say, ‘OK, bye,’ because the calls are expensive.”
That’s how Alejandro, an asylum seeker from Cuba, described his time in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center.
His account is one of dozens captured in a collection of audio recordings as part of a project aiming to show how the US immigration detention system, the world’s largest, has commodified people as part of a for-profit industry.
“We’ve commodified human displacement,” said artist David Taylor, who has used drones to take aerial photography and video of 28 privately run Ice detention centers near the US southern border, in California, Arizona and Texas.
While accounts of abuse and exploitation from inside facilities appear in the news media, the detention centers are usually in isolated, underpopulated areas with […]
