Stephan: What I find fascinating is how radically different the Republican and Democratic approach to the future is made obvious. Not just the difference between Trump and Biden, although that is so different it is bizarre, but the two parties as a whole. American infrastructure was largely built about 100 years ago and today it is coming apart. Sewers, waterlines, the electrical grid, bridges, roads, and sidewalks all are falling apart -literally in many cases. Because we only have one social value in this country, profit, fixing infrastructure which is expensive and produces little immediate profit, has been a very low priority. Now we have no choice and it is the Democrats who see why this issue must be addressed.
Construction workers upgrade the Green Line light rail system run by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority in Boston on August 6, 2020. Credit: Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe/Getty
Four congressional Democrats on Friday unveiled the BUILD GREEN Infrastructure and Jobs Act, a bill that would invest $500 billion over 10 years in state, local, and tribal projects to galvanize the transition to all electric public transportation—reducing climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions and health-threatening air pollution while expanding clean mass transit and creating up to one million new jobs.
“This bill would make a dramatic, material difference in the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people.” —Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Modeled after the Department of Transportation’s BUILD grant program, the bill (pdf) to provide grant funding to green the nation’s public transportation infrastructure while creating good-paying jobs in the process was introduced by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) as well as Reps. Andrew Levin (D-Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
“The climate crisis is an existential threat to our planet,” Warren acknowledged in a press release, “but it’s also a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, […]
The coronavirus pandemic didn’t have to become politicized—or racialized. But last March, President Donald Trump “decided to call coronavirus, which has no ethnicity or zip code or nationality, the China virus,” says Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali on the 100th episode of The New Abnormal.
“There was no reason to make coronavirus a racist thing,” co-host Molly Jong-Fast adds.
Now, not only are people of Chinese descent coming under attack across the U.S., but other Asians—because “bigots aren’t nuanced,” adds Ali, who wrote about the wave of anti-Asian hate for The Daily Beast before the Atlanta massage parlor murders.
“As a Muslim, as a son of Pakistani immigrants, we’ve been through this for the past 20 years,” he tells Jong-Fast. “And I realized that that story in America is the original story that gets a remake, and sometimes the villain just gets changed, right? So right now it’s Chinese or the Chinese, whoever looks Chinese. It’s been Muslims. It’s always African Americans, it’s Latinos. We’re all the invaders.”
“It’s a society-wide problem,” he says, “that requires a society-wide solution.”
University of California, San Francisco, - Phys.org
Stephan: As I watch television I am astonished at how people are sold the idea that coating something or themselves in chemicals, filling their homes with chemicals is going to improve their lives when actually those chemicals are going to do the opposite.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain
Scientists at UC San Francisco have detected 109 chemicals in a study of pregnant women, including 55 chemicals never before reported in people and 42 “mystery chemicals,” whose sources and uses are unknown.
The chemicals most likely come from consumer products or other industrial sources. They were found both in the blood of pregnant women, as well as their newborn children, suggesting they are traveling through the mother’s placenta.
The study will be published March 17, 2021, in Environmental Science & Technology.
“These chemicals have probably been in people for quite some time, but our technology is now helping us to identify more of them,” said Tracey J. Woodruff, Ph.D., a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at UCSF.
A former EPA scientist, Woodruff directs the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment (PRHE) and the Environmental Research and Translation for Health (EaRTH) Center, both at UCSF.
“It is alarming that we keep seeing certain chemicals travel from pregnant women to their children, which means these chemicals can be with us for generations,” she said.
Stephan: As the Atlanta mass murderer made clear once again, the evangelical christofascist community has real sexual dysfunction issues. We see this over and over, and yet few are willing to admit what their eyes see. This community of White people, particularly the White men, are disordered when it comes to sex.
When Brad Onishi heard that the man accused of a rampage at three Atlanta-area spas told detectives that he had carried out the attacks as a way to eliminate his own temptations, the claim sounded painfully familiar.
Dr. Onishi, who grew up in a strict evangelical community in Southern California that emphasized sexual purity, had spent his teenage years tearing out any advertisements in surfing magazines that featured women in bikinis. He had traded his online passwords with friends to hold himself accountable. “We had a militant vigilance: Don’t let anything in the house that will tempt you sexually,” Dr. Onishi, now an associate professor of religious studies at Skidmore College, recalled.
The evangelical culture he was raised in, he said, “teaches women to hate their bodies, as the source of temptation, and it teaches men to hate their minds, which lead them into lust and sexual immorality.”
Robert Aaron Long, the suspect in the massacres that left eight people dead, told the police this week that he had a “sexual addiction,” and he had been a customer at two of the […]
Stephan: I completely agree with this writer. And this Atlanta mass murder is yet another example of America's White male problem. Do you ever see stories about Chinese mass murderers in the U.S.? How about Japanese? No? Indonesians? No? Black killers like the Atlanta killer? No? Cubans? No? Columbians? No? Venezuelans? Not them either? And so that leaves us with what? Why White males, of course, further illustrating America's White male problem. There is something deeply wrong with American culture that White males are the source of nearly all domestic terrorism, and it always seems to involve guns.
A demonstrator places flowers during a protest in Atlanta on Thursday following the mass shooting there this week. (Megan Varner/Getty
An incomplete list of things I do not ever need to hear or read about a shooter again, especially one who targets women:
I do not need to hear that he “snapped,” “lost it” or “had a bad day.”
After he has taken the lives of six or eight or 14 other people, I am not inclined to care what kind of day he had.
I do not need to hear that he was heartbroken over a woman who dumped him/rejected him/ignored him. It is not the responsibility of women to pay attention to men to make sure those men do not shoot other people.
I do not particularly care whether his family was shocked.
I do not particularly care whether he did not resist arrest.
I do not need to hear about how he was a churchgoer, unless that revelation also comes with an acknowledgment that some faiths have historically taught such horrifying messages of misogyny and female subservience that “he went to church” is […]
