Stephan: It isn't just eating animals, and fowl we must rethink, we are destroying the ecosystems of the oceans, rivers, and lakes. We have got to stop treating the planet as an exploitable resource and begin to realize that we live embedded in a matrix of consciousness, that all life is interconnected and interdependent, and that we must make fostering wellbeing of all life forms our first priority at every level.
Large beluga sturgeon in lake Credit: Getty
The human population shows no signs of being threatened, though the same can’t be said for our fellow animals. In particular, freshwater fish, which humans have used for food, sport and as pets for millennia, are in the middle of an ecological crisis of our doing. That’s according to a recent report put together by 16 global conservation organizations, which estimated that roughly one-third of the world’s 18,075 freshwater fish species face possible extinction.
The report, which was published by groups including the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Global Wildlife Conservation, argues that climate change, pollution, the introduction of invasive species, the destruction of habitats and overly aggressive draining and damming of the world’s rivers, lakes and wetlands have played a role in the decline of freshwater fish species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said that, of the more than 10,000 species whose conservation status has been studied, 30 percent are at risk of going extinct.
The extinction of billions of freshwater fish would have catastrophic consequences on the human world. […]
Stephan: Today I had to go to the doctor's and as I sat there double-masked, at the other end of the waiting room an attractive blonde-haired middle-aged woman also sat. After a few moments I noticed that although she made not a sound, there were tears streaming down her face. I was torn between giving her privacy in her obvious sadness, and saying something, and finally I asked her, "Are you okay?" She looked up at me, seeing me I think for the first time, and answered, "My mother... she died last night in Seattle of Covid." I responded by saying the sort of things you say, as the doctor came out to usher me into his treatment room. When I came out the woman was gone. All day I have been thinking about what has happened to America, and why. How hundreds to thousands of us have died, leaving millions of us bereft as that woman, lives forever changed, and much of that death utterly unnecessary. So in recognition of those deaths, and the truth of why so many of them happened I am devoting today's edition of SR to that single issue.
Erin Cunningham and Paul Schemm, Reporters - The Washington Post
Stephan: I listened and watched President Biden's moving remembrance of the hundreds of thousands who have died from this pandemic. A crisis so badly handled by the Trump administration that we have 4.23% of the world's population and 25% of those who died from this pandemic. And, as Anthony Fauci has stated explicitly 10s of thousands of those deaths are be directly attributed to the Republican politicization of the government policies to deal with the pandemic. Donald Trump and the Republican Party are guilty of mass murder; it is that simple.
Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, listens during a news conference at the White House Jan. 21, 2021. Credit: Al Drago/Bloomberg
Half a million people in the United States should not have died from the coronavirus pandemic in one of the world’s richest and most sophisticated countries, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci said amid ceremonies marking half a million dead from the coronavirus pandemic.
In remarks to Reuters on Monday, Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called the death toll of 500,000 “stunning” and said that “intense” political divisiveness contributed to the nation’s poor handling of the pandemic.
“This is the worst thing that’s happened to this country with regard to the health of the nation in over 100 years,” he said.Here are some significant developments:
Amid Monday’s solemn ceremony commemorating 500,000 dead, there was also good news, vaccinations are up, deaths and new infections are down and the question of beating the pandemic is now more when than if.
Stephan: The united States is faced with an existential crisis, even larger than the Covid-19 pandemic, indeed, the pandemic is part of this larger trend -- climate change. What we have seen in the past month alone is that the Republican ideology is simply inadequate to deal with this challenge to human civilization in the United States. And yet about a third of the American population simply does not seem capable of recognizing the facts of that reality.
Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty
The U.S. is expected to cross a grim milestone on Monday that was unimagined by even the worst projections from the beginning of the pandemic nearly one year ago: Half a million dead from COVID-19. And those are just the direct deaths from recorded instances of the disease. Excess mortality rates show that for every two official COVID-19 deaths, there’s another excess death, likely due to myriad related causes, from increased rates of poverty to strains on the health care system to undiagnosed cases. What is clear, however, is that the past year has exposed the rot of GOP ideology that led to such excess death and despair.
While Republicans love to quibble to muddy the waters around pandemic failure assessment, there is no denying that Donald Trump’s approach to the coronavirus — do as little as possible, push for premature re-openings, hide the evidence by discouraging testing — led to hundreds of thousands more dead Americans than we would have seen […]
Stephan: Thousands of us, tens of thousands of us, died as a result of deliberate calculated disinformation spread by Trump, the Republicans in Congress and the Rightwing media fantasy machine. When I think of those deaths I remember that most of the dead Americans were part of a social node of family and friends, four, five, six, 10 men, women, and children those dead left behind whose lives are forever changed.
As the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus pandemic approached the half-million mark, one of the nation’s top doctors on Sunday tied the politicization of mask-wearing—for which former President Donald Trump and various other Republicans have been widely criticized—to “tens of thousands” of deaths nationwide.
“The evidence was pretty compelling by last March or April that uniform wearing of masks would reduce transmission of this disease. And yet, with a variety of messages through a variety of sources, mask-wearing became a statement about your political party or an invasion of your personal freedom,” National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins told “Axios on HBO.”
“A mask is nothing more than a life-saving medical device, and yet it got categorized in all sorts of other ways that were not factual, not scientific, and, frankly, dangerous,” he said. “And I think you could make a case that tens of thousands of people died as a result.”
While in office, Trump at times mocked mask-wearing and refused to don one himself despite expert conclusions that face coverings and social distancing could save many lives. As president, he was diagnosed with Covid-19 and hospitalized in early October, but eventually recovered; critics
