Stephan: I think America's foreign policy in relation to Cuba since the 1960s has been governed more by emotion than good sense. Cuba's healthcare system is a model of how a small poor country can nonetheless provide better social outcome data than the illness profit system of its great northern neighbor.
Since last year, approximately 440 Cubans have died from COVID-19, giving Cuba one of the lowest death rates per capita in the world. Cuba is also developing five COVID-19 vaccines, including two which have entered stage 3 trials. Cuba has heavily invested in its medical and pharmaceutical system for decades, in part because of the six-decade U.S. embargo that has made it harder for Cuba to import equipment and raw materials from other countries. That investment, coupled with the country’s free, universal healthcare system, has helped Cuba keep the virus under control and quickly develop vaccines against it, says Dr. Rolando Pérez Rodríguez, the director of science and innovation at BioCubaFarma, which oversees Cuba’s medicine development. “We have long experience with these kinds of technologies,” he says. We also speak with Reed Lindsay, journalist and founder of the independent, Cuba-focused media organization Belly of the Beast, who says U.S. sanctions on Cuba continue to cripple the country. “Cuba is going through an unbelievable economic crisis, and the sanctions have been absolutely devastating,” says Lindsay.
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AMY GOODMAN: As the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 tops 560,000 and Brazil records over 4,200 […]
Stephan: I have lived most of my life on coastlines on both the Eastern and Western coasts. I live on an island. And I particularly like living near wilderness, because I have spent some of my most memorable time in the woods, or under the water. I like living outside of small towns that have some character. As the climate change increases and I have looked at the submergence maps, and projected climate data I have grown ever more concerned that most of these places, and even much larger communities, are not adequately preparing for what they will face. Here is a good assessment of that.
If you are located in one of these places I urge you to get involved with your local government structure. Collective citizen intention -- it is the 8 Laws again -- are what it will take to get things up to speed where you live. Pay attention to the data as it is made available.
The Foxconn factory promises jobs and investment in Wisconsin, but for neighboring Illinois it’s a potential flooding risk. Credit: Mark Hertzberg/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service/Getty
When then-Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) announced plans in 2017 for a sprawling Foxconn electronics plant, he touted the 13,000 promised jobs and $10 billion investment spread across 1,000 acres, much of it farmland. Downstream across the border in Lake County, Ill., officials focused on a more sinister byproduct: water.
Earlier that summer, more than seven inches of rain drenched the county, setting off flash flooding. Six days later, swollen rivers flowing south from Wisconsin crested at record heights. Families evacuated. More than 3,000 structures flooded. Damage exceeded $12 million.
Where Wisconsin saw jobs and tax revenue, Illinois saw a rising threat. “We realized there were significant storm-water concerns,” said Kurt Woolford, the interim executive director of the Lake County Stormwater Management Commission. “Water doesn’t follow political boundaries, it doesn’t follow state boundaries.”Advertisement
But rainfall estimates used to design storm-water desigsystems do. As they analyzed whether the plans for Foxconn could handle extreme rain, […]
Stephan: I am becoming increasingly concerned that the Republicans, having no clear policy agenda, and faced with a successful president, are devolving into a culture war cult. This has very detrimental implications for kids, particularly, because of the christofascist sex obsession, with LGBTQ kids. You can see this play out in all the legislation suddenly popping up in Republican-controlled state legislatures all over the country.
Middle school studentsCredit: Getty
Republicans, having lost their decade-long fight to prevent same-sex couples from getting married, are now targeting an even more vulnerable population for the next round of culture war hysterics: Trans children.
The GOP is clearly convinced that the way to win the 2022 elections is by stirring people up with lurid, false tales of predatory trans people. They’ve recently passed a slew of state-level bills attacking trans rights, especially in public schools. The victims are some of the people least able to protect themselves: Minor children, many who are already struggling with difficulties stemming from being trans, queer, or otherwise gender nonconforming — a category so broad that it could capture most kids, depending on the interpretation.
Stephan: Since its beginnings with William F. Buckley, I have found the National Review, self-congratulatory, pretentious, and smug. Over those decades it has also proven itself to be intellectually unsound in its reasoning if your criteria are social outcome data. But it is an influential force amongst the right. I take this as a datapoint telling us something important about the emerging anti-democratic White nationalist christofascist movement that has taken over the Republican Party. They do not like democracy, and are going to do everything they can to rig it.
In the last week-plus, the nominally intellectual right-wing publication National Review has run threeseparatearticles arguing that voting shouldn’t be easier to do, because if it is, stupid, ill-informed people will do too much of it. What?
Roughly speaking, we got to this moment like so:
1. Donald Trump lost a presidential election, in which Georgia was one of the states that he lost by a very narrow margin.
2. Trump and his allies in the Republican Party claimed his losses in Georgia and elsewhere were the result of fraud—a centralized plot, carried out in predominately Black areas and coordinated with foreign governments, to rig voting machines and submit fake ballots. This culminated on Jan. 6 when Trump supporters, many of whom were members of white-nationalist groups, stormed the grounds of the Capitol.
3. Republican-controlled state legislatures and statehouses in Georgia and elsewhere passed laws rolling back automatic voter registration, mail-in voting, and early in-person voting, on the grounds that such restrictions are needed to restore public trust in the electoral system. Historically, these methods have been disproportionately used by Black voters […]
Stephan: I just love stories like this. What was formerly nothing but waste and a problem, turned into a healing asset. Good news.
Before and after images of the land upon which the coffee waste was dumped. Credit: assets.rebelmouse
One of the biggest problems with coffee production is that it generates an incredible amount of waste. Once coffee beans are separated from cherries, about 45% of the entire biomass is discarded.
So for every pound of roasted coffee we enjoy, an equivalent amount of coffee pulp is discarded into massive landfills across the globe. That means that approximately 10 million tons of coffee pulp is discarded into the environment every year.
When disposed of improperly, the waste can cause serious damage soil and water sources.
However, a new study published in the British Ecological Society journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence has found that coffee pulp isn’t just a nuisance to be discarded. It can have an incredibly positive impact on regrowing deforested areas of the planet.
In 2018, researchers from ETH-Zurich and the University of Hawaii spread 30 dump trucks worth of coffee pulp over a roughly 100′ x 130′ area of degraded land in Costa Rica. The experiment took place on a former […]
