Stephan: If you are a woman living in Texas I hope you realize the Trump christofascists have just legally rendered you a second-class person. You no longer have full control over your body. And just to make sure you don't the christofascists have put anyone who tries to help you exercise control over your body legally at risk. Personally, I would not live in Texas, or any of the states where citizens have given control of their lives over to the Trump cultists and I know my wife, as a woman, feels even more strongly about this than I do.
Abortion rights activists hold placards and chant outside of the U.S. Supreme Court ahead of a ruling on abortion clinic restrictions on June 27, 2016 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty
“Abhorrent” and “unconscionable” were words used Wednesday by women’s health and rights advocates to describe the latest extreme ban on abortion care as Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a measure that bans the procedure after six weeks and allows virtually any private citizen to attempt to penalize abortion providers in the state.
The law, which provides no exceptions for survivors or rape or incest, is set to take effect in September.
“The cruelty is so clearly the point,” tweeted NARAL Pro-Choice America.
Along with the ban, which would put abortion care out of reach for women before many even find out they are pregnant, Senate Bill 8 allows any citizen—regardless of their connection to a patient or lack thereof—to sue anyone who “aids or abets” abortion care.
As The Guardianreported, the measure opens up “a breathtakingly wide range of possible people and groups” who could be sued for helping someone […]
Stephan: Finally, it is beginning to dawn on some politicians, those who are not corrupted, or just plain dim, that policies that foster welbeing produce better results than the usual let's punish the poor policies. So I see this as good news, particularly because this view is spreading, as this story describes.
A mother and son walk through one of the neighborhoods of Stockton where participants in the city’s universal basic income program live in Stockton, California, on February 7, 2020.
It’s probably safe to say that a few years ago, most Americans weren’t familiar with the term universal basic income, commonly abbreviated as UBI. But more recently, as the idea has grown in popularity among the tech community, and with Andrew Yang’s presidential run putting it into the political spotlight, the idea of everybody in the country receiving a monthly check just for existing has begun to capture the public’s imagination and has become a more normalized part of the political lexicon.
It’s important to note that there are multiple versions of universal basic income, from libertarian or right-wing iterations which see the UBI as a replacement for public benefits, to more progressive versions, such as those discussed in this article, which are intended as a supplement to already existing social safety net programs and which do not use means-testing (such as requiring employment) as a qualifying factor.
Stephan: I cannot tell you how much I want to stop having to write about the Trump trend. But, as you can see on any news program, or on the front page of any paper, the endless fecal storm that always swirls around Trump never ends, and it looks like his corruption and criminality will continue to haunt our days for months maybe years to come.
Taxpayers are still footing the bill for Donald Trump to pay aides, Business Insider reported Monday.
“President Donald Trump’s advisor Stephen Miller lost his White House access on January 20, but he continues to pocket a government paycheck — and is slated to do so until late July, according to government records,” Business Insider reported. “Miller is one of at least 17 people who continued to receive taxpayer-funded salaries while working for Trump’s post-presidential transition office, according to government documents released to Insider under the Freedom of Information Act. Trump’s post-presidential staff is expected to receive about $1.3 million in federal salary and benefits between January 20 and July 21, when the formal presidential transition period ends, according to an estimate prepared by the General Services Administration.”
That allows Trump to spend more than $200,000 a month on salary and benefits.
“For Trump, accepting public money has meant employing 10 transition aides in Palm Beach, Florida — where Trump has been living since he left the White House — and another seven aides in an office building […]
Stephan: Here is a trend about which you read almost nothing but which is having a significant influence. The breakdown of America and its ideological divisions, one might more accurately say differing realities, is not a worldwide phenomenon, and it is changing the way the world looks at us and considers our status in the world. We are greatly diminished.
Demonstrators argue during a protest against U.S. immigration policies in New York City in 2018. Credit: Karla Ann Cote/NurPhoto/Getty
When it comes to key cultural issues, Americans are significantly more divided along ideological lines than people in the United Kingdom, France and Germany, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of surveys conducted in the four countries in fall 2020.
Across 11 questions on cultural subjects ranging from nationalism to political correctness, the gap between the ideological left and right in the United States – or liberals and conservatives, in the common U.S. parlance – is significantly wider than the ideological gaps found in the European countries surveyed. In some cases, this is because America’s conservatives are outliers. In other cases, it’s because America’s liberals are outliers. In still other cases, both the right and left in the U.S. hold more extreme positions than their European counterparts, resulting in ideological gaps that are more than twice the size of those seen in the UK, Germany or France.
Below, we explore these trends in more detail.How we did this
Stephan: Forests are an essential part of earth's matrix of life, and the destruction by humans, either through exploitation as with the Amazon Rain Forest, or brought on by human-mediated climate change is seriously imperilling the balance of that matrix. The consequences to all life forms, including humans, will be dire.
Google Earth image of a healthy forest on the lower right and a ghost forest full of dead trees on the left. Credit: Emily Ury
For years, Emily Ury traversed North Carolina’s coastal roads, studying patches of skeletal trees slain by rising seas that scientists call “ghost forests.” Killed by intruding saltwater along the Atlantic Coast, they are previews of the dire fate other forests face worldwide.
Ury knew that ghost forests were expanding in the region, but only when she began looking down from above using Google Earth did she realize how extensive they were.
“I found so many dead forests,” says Ury, an ecologist at Duke University and co-author of a paper on the rapid deforestation of the North Carolina coast published last month in the journal Ecological Applications. “They were everywhere.”
As the ocean intrudes and saltwater rises, it kills trees and creates these ghost forests—bare trunks, and stumps, ashen tombstones marking a once-thriving coastal ecosystem. In North Carolina, pine, red maple, sweetgum and bald cypress forests are being replaced by saltmarsh. Eventually, that saltmarsh will be replaced by open water, […]
