Stephan: As a result of the Trump EPA pro-pesticide decisions, the decline of bees in the U.S., which I have reported on several times in the past, continues. This has critical implications for the country's agriculture and your life and the life of your family. You can expect your food prices to go up, and you can also see less healthy plants in your garden. Seen in the context of the concurrent radical decline of the Monarch butterflies it is obvious that industrial chemical monoculture agriculture is destroying the planet's ecosystems and is not sustainable.
Working bees on honey cells Credit: Shutterstock
Beekeepers this year in the United States reported the second highest annual loss of managed honey bee colonies since records began in 2006, according to results of a nationwide survey released Wednesday.
The non-profit Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) said in its preliminary analysis that beekeepers—ranging from small backyard keepers to commercial operations—lost 45.5% of their colonies between April 2020 and April 2021. The results are based on a survey of over 3,300 U.S. beekeepers managing a combined 192,384 colonies.
“The worrisome part is we see no progression towards a reduction of losses.”
“This year’s survey results show that colony losses are still high,” said Nathalie Steinhauer, BIP’s science coordinator and a post-doctoral researcher in the University of Maryland Department of Entomology, in a statement.
The annual loss is 6.1 percentage points higher than the average loss rate of 39.4% over the last 10 years, the researchers said.
“Though we see fluctuations from year to year,” said Steinhauer, “the worrisome part is we see no progression towards a reduction of losses.”
Stephan: Have you ever wondered why police violence in the United States is so very different from every other developed democracy in the world? How is it over 1,000 people a year are killed by American police when, in a country like Norway, police don't even fire their weapons more than once or twice in a year, and rarely kill anyone, and certainly not as George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin while three other police officers looked on and did nothing to stop the torture and killing?
Part of it is clearly the training. Police in other countries go through several years of training and must have college degrees, while U.S. police require nothing more than a high school diploma, and only train for a few months. But another part of it is the consciousness that is instilled in trainees, and that continues thereafter. The idea that the police are at war with the people they are supposed to serve. This is the best essay I have read on this subject.
Illustration by Danielle Del Plato
In may 2020, Darnella Frazier, a 17-year-old with a smartphone camera, documented the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Most Americans who watched the video of Floyd begging for his life, as Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck, saw a human being. Robert Kroll did not. The head of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis saw a “violent criminal” and viewed the protests that followed as a “terrorist movement.” In a letter to union members, he complained that Chauvin and the three other officers involved in Floyd’s death had been “terminated without due process.”
Kroll’s response was typical. In the apocalyptic rhetoric of police-union leaders, every victim of police misconduct is a criminal who had it coming, and anyone who objects to such misconduct is probably also a criminal, and, by implication, a legitimate target of state violence. Due process is a privilege reserved for the righteous—that is, police officers who might lose their jobs, not the citizens who might lose their lives in a chance encounter with law enforcement.
Stephan: Jennifer Rubin in this essay describes another aspect of The Great Schism Trend that is becoming such a pronounced feature of the United States. About a third of Americans are now living in what Rachel Maddow calls "Earth 2," something new in our history. There have been other times when the country was severely divided, but this is the first time one side lives in a fact-based world, and the other does not.
Doses of coronavirus vaccines are seen at a vaccination facility in Cloverdale, California. Credit: Melina Mara/The Washington Post
We have plenty of fault lines in America, including those having to do with race, religion and class. Now, we have a fault line based on the willful refusal to embrace science. This is not an academic issue; it will kill many Americans. Others will experience long-term side effects.
Bloomberg reports: “Covid-19 transmission is accelerating in several poorly vaccinated states, primarily in the South plus Missouri and Utah, and more young people are turning up at hospitals. The data present the clearest sign of a rebound in the U.S. in months.” This failure seems to be the result of rotten, red-state governments that routinely fail to meet the needs of its people, a toxic MAGA culture that spurns scientific expertise, and a self-destructive, right-wing media that discourages rational thinking.
Certainly, an evangelical Christian movement that embraces conspiracy theories and refuses to hold people accountable for their actions also plays […]
Stephan: If you read me regularly you know that for some time I have been saying the problem with America is Americans, and the fact that we cannot tell ourselves the truth about ourselves and, thus, in spite of our economic strength, our society is exceptional only its social inferiority across a wide range of social outcome measures. Facts are facts. Nicholas Kristoff seems to have come to the same conclusion.
“America is back” became President Biden’s refrain on his European trip this month, and in a narrow sense it is.
Credit: Erin Kirkland/The New York Times
We no longer have a White House aide desperately searching for a fire alarm to interrupt a president as he humiliates our country at an international news conference, as happened in 2018. And a Pew Research Center survey found that 75 percent of those polled in a dozen countries expressed “confidence in the U.S. president to do the right thing,” compared with 17 percent a year ago.
Yet in a larger sense, America is not back. In terms of our well-being at home and competitiveness abroad, the blunt truth is that America is lagging. In some respects, we are sliding toward mediocrity.
Greeks have higher high school graduation rates. Chileans live longer. Fifteen-year-olds in Russia, Poland, Latvia and many other countries are better at math than their American counterparts — perhaps a metric for where nations will stand in a generation […]
Stephan: I have been writing about what I call The Great Schism Trend for a decade, but this trend has taken a turn I did not think we would get to. Recently I have done story after story about how the Republican Party at the state level is trying to gut democracy, keeping the form, but not the substance. Doing this through surgically targeted voter suppression and gerrymandering. I confess that a part of me feels the voters in those states have gotten what they voted for.
But now there is this. At the same time as Republican-controlled states are moving to authoritarian fascism, states controlled by Democrats are going in the opposite direction; they are making voting more universal and fair. Wonderful good news.
The result of all this is that if you live in a Republican-controlled state you will no longer live in a democracy, but if you live in a Democrat-controlled state democracy is not only supported but thriving.
Can a nation endure when part of it is fascist and part of it is democratic? I guess we are going to find out because the U.S. government at the federal level is constipated to the point of dysfunction. The obvious thing to do would be to pass universal federal election rules that overrule all the state fascist nonsense, and that support ease of voting, and a voting environment where there is a high probability that any voter who wishes to vote can do so. But the Democrats can't seem to figure out how to do that in the face of a Republican Party that won't even talk about the issue.
Voting in Las Vegas on Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020. Nevada permanently adopted universal mail voting this year. Credit: John Locher/AP
More than half of U.S. states have lowered somebarriers to voting since the 2020 election, making permanent practices that helped produce record voter turnout during the coronavirus pandemic — a striking countertrend to the passage this year of restrictions in key Republican-controlled states.
New laws in states from Vermont to California expand access to the voting process on a number of fronts, such as offering more options for early and mail voting, protecting mail ballots from being improperly rejected and making registering to vote easier.
Some states restored voting rights to people with past felony convictions or expanded options for voters with disabilities, two long-standing priorities among voting advocates. And in Virginia, a new law requires localities to receive preapproval or feedback on voting changesas a shield against racial discrimination, a first for states after the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the federal Voting Rights Act in 2013.
The push to make voting easier aroundthe country comes even […]
