Stephan: I think Nicholas Kristof has got it right. If the Democrats in 2022 can retain control of the House and Senate, which I think they will, by 2024 the changes Biden, Harris, and the Democrats in Congress will have wrought in America will have changed the course of the nation in such a positive way that the Republican Party will be cast into the wilderness for a generation. I see this as very good news.
President Franklin Roosevelt
YAMHILL, OREGON — The best argument for President Biden’s three-part proposal to invest heavily in America and its people is an echo of Franklin Roosevelt’s explanation for the New Deal.
“In 1932 there was an awfully sick patient called the United States of America,” Roosevelt said in 1943. “He was suffering from a grave internal disorder … and they sent for a doctor.”
Paging Dr. Joe Biden.
We should be cleareyed about both the enormous strengths of the United States — its technologies, its universities, its entrepreneurial spirit — and its central weakness: For half a century, compared with other countries, we have underinvested in our people.
In 1970, the United States was a world leader in high school and college attendance, enjoyed high life expectancy and had a solid middle class. This was achieved in part because of Roosevelt.
The New Deal was imperfect and left out too many African-Americans and Native Americans, but it was still transformative.
Here in my hometown, Yamhill, the New Deal was an engine of opportunity. A few farmers had rigged generators on streams, but […]
Stephan: Here is some more exciting good news. The argument against wind turbines has been that they killed birds. Well, the technology is moving on, and this is the next step. No spinning turbine blades.
Wind farms certainly allow for the production of clean energy. Although they are 100% renewable, they still have problems. They have high costs, disfigure the landscape, produce noise pollution, and above all, have a heavy impact on fauna, and in particular on birds.
Vortex Bladeless wind turbines generate electricity from the vibration. Credit: Vortex Bladeless
The Spanish startup Vortex Bladeless has developed a bladeless turbine that can revolutionize wind energy, especially at the household level, and become the alternative to solar panels. The design of the Spanish firm has already received the approval of Norway’s state energy company, Equinor.
The new turbine, which has also been called the “Skybrator” due to its phallic shape, is capable of harnessing energy from winds without the sweeping white blades everyone associates with wind power. It generates wind energy thanks to vibration and without generating the environmental and visual impact on the fauna of the large wind farms.
Vortex Bladeless Design. Credit: Vortex Bladeless
About 3 meters high, it is basically a curve-topped […]
Stephan: I have been predicting this for years: migrations occurring because of climate change, and now they are occurring. Media has finally woken up to this trend as this transcribed interview describes.
The way to stop migrations is to assist countries in dealing with climate change in a way that fosters wellbeing. It will be more productive, more efficient, easier to implement, longer enduring, and much much cheaper.
Central American immigrants
We look at the link between migration and the climate emergency, which studies have estimated could displace over 200 million people by 2050, including many in Central American countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Last year, two hurricanes, Iota and Eta, devastated the region and forced thousands to flee north. A new report finds that the climate crisis is already a driver in migration from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, which reiterates the necessity of planning “ahead for the major migration flows,” says Camila Bustos, human rights associate at the University Network for Human Rights. “What we’re really telling the Biden administration is to take this data, look into it, think critically and creatively about solutions, and revise immigration policy.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. And we look now at the link between the climate emergency and migration. Studies have estimated climate change could displace over 200 million people by 2050, including many in Central America, including Guatemala, El […]
Stephan: This report about the anti-vaxxers, like reports about the number of people who still think Trump actually won the election, or Democrats are importing migrants of color so they can replace White people, or vaccines contain micro-chips so Bill Gates can monitor your every move, and on and on, I think are all telling us the same thing. About a third of the United States'population are not intellectually or emotionally capable of living in a fact-based reallity. Instead, they live in an emotional world of fantasy, fear, resentment, and mistrust.
Credit: Adam Maida/ The Atlantic
Several days ago, the mega-popular podcast host Joe Rogan advised his young listeners to skip the COVID-19 vaccine. “I think you should get vaccinated if you’re vulnerable,” Rogan said. “But if you’re 21 years old, and you say to me, ‘Should I get vaccinated?’ I’ll go, ‘No.’”
Rogan’s comments drew widespread condemnation. But his view is surprisingly common. One in four Americans says they don’t plan to take the COVID-19 vaccine, and about half of Republicans under 50 say they won’t get a vaccine. This partisan vaccine gap is already playing out in the real world. The average number of daily shots has declined 20 percent in the past two weeks, largely because states with larger Trump vote shares are falling off the pace.
What are they thinking, these vaccine-hesitant, vaccine-resistant, and COVID-apathetic? I wanted to know. So I posted an invitation on Twitter for anybody who wasn’t planning to get vaccinated to email me and explain why. In the past few days, I spoke or corresponded with more than a dozen such people. I told them […]
Apoorva Mandavilli, Science Reporter - The New York Times
Stephan: You can't fix stupid. The problem is that when you have this level of stupidity in a country it may make getting this pandemic under control impossible. Here are the facts, and they are very disturbing.
Early in the pandemic, when vaccines for the coronavirus were still just a glimmer on the horizon, the term “herd immunity” came to signify the endgame: the point when enough Americans would be protected from the virus so we could be rid of the pathogen and reclaim our lives.
Now, more than half of adults in the United States have been inoculated with at least one dose of a vaccine. But daily vaccination rates are slipping, and there is widespread consensus among scientists and public health experts that the herd immunity threshold is not attainable — at least not in the foreseeable future, and perhaps not ever.
Instead, they are coming to the conclusion that rather than making a long-promised exit, the virus will most likely become a manageable threat that will continue to circulate in the United States for years to come, still causing hospitalizations and deaths but in much smaller numbers.
How much smaller is uncertain and depends in part on how much of the nation, and the world, becomes vaccinated and how the coronavirus evolves. It is […]
