Emma Tucker, Omar Jimenez and Kristina Sgueglia,, - CNN
Stephan: America's gun madness becomes more and more violent; it has reached a level you would only expect to see in a war zone. This 4th of July weekend there were 400 shootings, 400!, and 150 people died as a result. Yet, it is easier to buy a gun than it is to vote in many states. I wonder how many people have to be murdered each weekend before any of this changes. Would 1,000 deaths a weekend make any difference? Would 5,000 deaths have an effect? I'm not sure, but we may find out. America is a very dangerous country.
At least 150 people were killed by gun violence in more than 400 shootings across the country during the Fourth of July weekend as major cities nationwide confront a surge in violent crime, according to data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive.The data, which includes the number of shooting incidents and gun violence victims nationally over a 72-hour period from Friday through Sunday, is still evolving and will be updated.In New York, where gun violence has been rising to levels not seen in years, there were 26 victims from 21 shootings from Friday to Sunday, a decrease from the same period last year when 30 people were shot in 25 shootings, the New York Police Department said.
On July 4, the city experienced 12 shooting incidents that involved 13 victims, an increase from last year when there were eight shootings and eight victims, according to the NYPD.So far this year, gun violence incidents in New York have spiked almost 40% over the same period in 2020, with 767 shootings and 885 victims. CNN […]
Stephan: Over this past week, three non-American readers wrote me to say that now that travel is possible again they had reconsidered their long-planned trip to the U.S. and decided not to make it. "I don't think I would feel safe in Atlanta," one man wrote me. A woman said that rather than coming to America she had arranged for her nephew and his family to come to her in Portugal. All three commented that the America they had known and previously visited seemed to have disappeared, and been replaced by a country they no longer knew or that felt safe. I wrote them back and told each of them that I agreed and felt much the same way.
This weekend, American skies will be aflame with fireworks celebrating our legacy of freedom and democracy, even as Republican legislature after Republican legislature constricts the franchise and national Republicans have filibustered the expansive For The People Act. It will be a strange spectacle.
It is hard to view your own country objectively. There is too much cant and myth, too many stories and rituals. So over the past week, I’ve been asking foreign scholars of democracy how the fights over the American political system look to them. These conversations have been, for the most part, grim.
“I’m positive that American democracy is not what Americans think it is,” David Altman, a political scientist in Chile, told me. “There is a cognitive dissonance between what American citizens believe their institutions are and what they actually are.”
“The thing that makes me really worried is how similar what’s going on in the U.S. looks to a series of countries in the world where democracy has really taken a big toll and, in many cases, died,” Staffan Lindberg, a Swedish political scientist who directs the Varieties of Democracy Institute, said. “I’m talking about countries like Hungary under Orban, Turkey in the early days of Erdogan’s rule, Modi […]
Stephan: Four hundred and ten million people displaced and on the move. The impact on every aspect of the societies where these climate change migrations occur can hardly be calculated, let alone prepared for. And yet that is the task humanity will face. We are simply not doing what needs to be done, not as a single country nor as an international coming together. As a result, the impact of these migrations is going to be horrific.
Sea rise about to provoke migration
Close to half a billion people could be in the path of sea level rise by 2100, a first-of-its-kind analysis has shown.
The study, published in Nature Communications Tuesday, found that 267 million people currently live on land that is less than two meters (approximately 6.6 feet) above sea level, the range that is the most vulnerable to rising water levels. By 2100, the number at risk could climb to 410 million people.
“These numbers are another wake-up call about the immense number of people at risk in low-lying areas, particularly in vulnerable countries in the global South, where people are often experiencing these risks as part of a toxic mix with other risk factors, currently also including Covid-19,” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contributing lead author Maarten van Aalst, who was not involved with the study, told The Guardian in response to the results.
Beyond its urgent warning, the new study was notable because of how it took land elevation into account.
“Coastal flood risk assessments require accurate land elevation data,” the […]
Stephan: Here is some good news for the entire planet.
It’s Friday, July 2, and the U.K. is accelerating its deadline for quitting coal.
The United Kingdom is planning to end all coal-fired electricity generation by October 2024, moving up the country’s previous target by a full year. The new timeline is designed to “send a clear signal around the world that the U.K. is leading the way in consigning coal power to the history books,” said Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the country’s energy and climate change minister, in a statement on Wednesday. The announcement comes months before the United Nations’ annual climate change summit, COP26, which will be hosted in November in Glasgow.
Ending coal-fired electricity does not mean ending coal extraction. The U.K. will still be mining coal for export and using it in industrial processes like steel production, and a heavily protested brand-new coal mine is still under consideration in Northern England.
Despite these caveats, any move to reduce coal consumption is good for the climate. Coal-fired electricity is extremely carbon-intensive, accounting for 30 percent of energy-related CO2 emissions globally. It’s also a major source […]
Stephan: I ran the earlier story referenced here. Wealth inequality has grown to such a difference that we essentially have two different species, each living in its own reality created by how the tax laws are conformed. This inequality has been planned and is deliberate. Laws were passed by politicians who would benefit from those laws. The tax laws make it legally permissible to turn a politician into your servant paying them through dark money. This matters because elections are so expensive in the United States that most Congress members spend hours each day raising money. The system is completely corrupt.
Warren Buffet Credit: Shutterstock
ProPublica is doing the Lord’s work. Specifically, investigative reporters Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel are doing it. Two weeks ago, the nonprofit news group published the first in a planned series of pieces revealing, in exquisite detail, the moral character of the very obscenely rich. The series will be based on “a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years.” It’s a goddamn truth-bomb:
It demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.
Their first report, published on June 8, exposed the very obscenely rich as the greatest tax dodgers of them all. But before I get into it, let me say two things. One, Eisinger et al. do more than […]
