Stephan: More good news from the Biden administration. Biden is committed to stopping and, indeed, reversing, the callous rape of our national lands by Trump and his ogres.
Escalante Grand Staircase National Monument Credit: Getty
The Biden administration says it has begun reaching out to elected officials, Native American tribes and other stakeholders as part of its review of the Trump administration’s controversial rollback of national monuments, kick-starting a process that is widely expected to result in President Joe Biden fulfilling a campaign promise to restore the protected sites.
As part of a sweeping first-day executive order to “protect public health and the environment and restore science,” Biden ordered the Interior Department to review President Donald Trump’s proclamations to dismantle three protected monuments, two in southern Utah and one off the Atlantic coast. Biden has slammed the monument cuts as among Trump’s “assaults on America’s natural treasures.”
In 2017, the Trump administration launched a review of recent national monument designations made under the Antiquities Act of 1906. That process featured administration officials cozying up to monument opponents, cherry-picking data and dismissing overwhelming public support for maintaining protected sites, and ended with Trump carving more than 2 million acres away from two sites in southern Utah.
Stephan: Everything eventually comes out. Every day Trump and his minions look worse, more corrupt, more criminal. The question now is accountability. If people are not held accountable then that will set the standard in the future, and corruption will be engineered into American government.
Putin on Russian television
Lost in the news on the day of Trump’s Insurrection was a devastating new watchdog report to Congress on the politicizing and distorting of intelligence during Donald Trump’s time in office.
The analytic ombudsman, career intelligence community veteran Barry A. Zulauf, determined that under Trump national intelligence reports had become highly politicized. Important findings were suppressed to appease Trump’s refusal to acknowledge Russian interference in American elections.
Zulauf’s unclassified report paints a frightening picture of just how much the Trump administration skewed intelligence to suppress knowledge of interference by Russia in our 2020 elections.
From March 2020, in the critical months leading up to the elections, Zulauf “identified a long story arc of—at the very least—perceived politicization of intelligence.”
Barry A. Zulauf
Zulauf works in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), a Cabinet-level position created after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to oversee all U.S. intelligence operations. Zulauf’s job within the ODNI was created by Congress to assist analysts throughout the intelligence community […]
Stephan: Yet another story about the almost grotesque structure of American healthcare. Hospitals throughout the Red value rural states desperate to get physicians on staff. Inner cities throughout the country with woefully inadequate healthcare facilities, or even private practitioners. And yet... well, read the story.
Dr. Kristy Cromblin of Pratville, Ala.: “I’ve had to encourage myself over and over: I am worth it. I am useful. I am damn good.”Credit: Charity Rachelle for The New York Times
Dr. Kristy Cromblin knew that as the descendant of Alabama sharecroppers and the first person in her family to go to college, making it to medical school might seem like an improbable dream. Her parents watched in proud disbelief as she inched closer to that goal, enrolling in a medical school in Barbados and enlisting in the military with plans to serve one day as a flight surgeon.
Then came an unexpected hurdle: A contentious divorce led Dr. Cromblin to take seven years away from medical school to care for her two sons. In 2012, she returned for her final year, excited to complete her exams and apply for residency, the final step in her training.
But no one had told Dr. Cromblin that hospital residency programs, which have been flooded with a rising number of applications in recent years, sometimes use the Electronic Residency Application Service software […]
Stephan: When I was a young futurist back in the late 1960s and early 70s, the big concern was over-population.
Biologist Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies and Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, and one of the icons of the environmental and population movements is one example. In a 1969 Ramparts magazine article “Eco-Catastrophe!” Ehrlich predicted, among other misses, that the oceans would be dead from DDT poisoning by 1979, US life expectancy would drop to 42 years by 1980 as the result of pesticide-induced cancers, and the US population would decline to under 23 million by 1999.10 In his 1974 book, The End of Affluence, Ehrlich saw the President dissolving Congress “during the food riots of the 1980s,” and suggested that because of these food shortages, the United States would feel compelled to use agricultural poisons to such an extent, causing so much damage to the environment, that a horrified world might launch a nuclear attack on the United States to stop Ameri- can pesticide pollution.11 Pretty scary stuff; and, oh yes— dead wrong.
Here is another confirmation that over-population is not going to be the defining issue envisioned 50 years ago.
Men’s average sperm counts are down globally and testosterone levels have plunged, while erectile dysfunction is, cruelly, on the rise. Credit: NY Post composite
Sperm counts in Western countries have dropped by more than 50 percent since the 1970s. At the same time, men’s problems with conceiving are going up: Erectile dysfunction is increasing and testosterone levels are declining by 1 percent each year.
“The current state of reproductive affairs can’t continue much longer without threatening human survival,” warns Mount Sinai fertility scientist Dr. Shanna Swan in her book, “Count Down” (Scribner), out Tuesday. “It’s a global existential crisis.”
Dr. Swan should know — she’s been researching fertility for thirty years. She studied a miscarriage boom in Santa Clara, Calif., in the 1980s, which she eventually linked to toxic waste dumped into the drinking water by a local semiconductor plant. She moved on to sperm rates in 1997 and they’ve been her “canary in a coal mine scenario” since. In 2017, she sounded the alarm with a meta-analysis of 40,000 men that showed that sperm count fell […]
RICHARD WIKE, JANELL FETTEROLF and CHRISTINE HUANG, - Pew Research Center
Stephan: Here is some lovely good news. After four years of general European loathing for Trump and declining respect and affection for the United States, under Biden matters have returned to the previous norm under Obama.
Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump was broadly unpopular internationally, and his poor ratings have had a negative impact on America’s overall image, especially among key allies and partners of the United States. By contrast, early reviews for his successor, President-elect Joe Biden, are much more positive, according to a new Pew Research Center survey in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. People in all three countries express confidence in Biden and optimism that relations with the U.S. will improve now that he is moving into the White House.
Large majorities in Germany (79%), France (72%) and the UK (65%) say they have confidence in Biden to do the right thing in world affairs – a dramatic change from the low ratings Trump received in a survey conducted in the summer of 2020 in these three nations. As he prepares to begin his presidency, Biden’s ratings are only slightly lower than the ratings Barack Obama received near the end of his second term.
Large majorities also say that, when thinking of the future of their country, they are optimistic about […]
