Stephan: More hard fact insights from the Census data. This report should make it clear to you why the Republican Party has turned into an anti-democratic, authoritarian, White supremacist, anti-science, christofascist cult. The only way they can stay in power is by rigging elections in one of several ways. In the 2022 elections a year from now we are going to find out how successful they have been.
A barn for Trump. Credit: Scott Olson/Getty
Donald Trump and the Republican Party he shaped represent the fading face of the United States, winning over an older, more rural, and overwhelmingly caucasian bloc of voters that reflected the country’s past more than its more urban and diverse future.
The latest data from the 2020 Census, which the government released on Thursday to kick off the congressional redistricting process, illustrate that fact in incredibly stark terms. It shows that the white population fell for the first time in history during the last decade, and that Americans continued to cluster in growing cities and suburbs, whether in Texas, Georgia, Virginia, or New York.
Perhaps most strikingly, while metro areas grew, vast stretches of the country continued to bleed population. About 53 percent of all U.S. counties shrank between 2010 and 2020. You can see them in the sea of burnt orange on the graph below, rural regions and small towns that often have few residents to begin with. In total, they were home to about 50.5 million people in a nation of more than 331 million.
Stephan: Do you doubt for a moment that other world leaders, particularly authoritarian ones, don't understand how corrupt the American government has become? Read this and disabuse yourself. Publicly funded elections are the only cure for this since indididual personal integrity clearly isn't up to the task.
Mohammed bin Zayed, the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates and a close American partner, knew about the UAE’s two efforts to interfere in the 2016 election, prosecutors say Credit: Barcroft Media /Getty
On July 20, federal prosecutors accused the United Arab Emirates of infiltrating Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign by using his adviser Tom Barrack as an agent. The new charges suggested that the wealthy Persian Gulf monarchy interfered in the 2016 election to a stunning degree: The Justice Department was already prosecuting a group of men for allegedly funneling over $3.5 million from UAE royal adviser George Nader to Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton.
According to law enforcement, one of America’s closest Middle East partners played both sides in one of the most consequential contests in U.S. history ― breaking the law and undermining democracy.
In naming and shaming Barrack and the UAE, the Justice Department hoped to put “everyone — regardless of their wealth or perceived political power — on notice,” acting Assistant Attorney General […]
Andrew S. Lewis, Contributing Writer - The New York Times
Stephan: This, and the following story, layout very clearly the full spectrum of how water is destiny is playing out. It is not going to happen, it is happening, changing the United States in ways that are only now being realized.
Bayfront homes in Ocean City. Credit: Devin Oktar Yalkin/The New York Times
From a satellite’s point of view, New Jersey’s barrier islands barely register, like fine white bones pulled from a body of green, separated by a vascular tissue of wetlands and shallow bays. Twenty thousand years ago, when the Laurentide ice sheet covered much of Canada and the northern United States, the coast of what would be New Jersey reached to the edge of the continental shelf, nearly 100 miles east of the present shoreline. For the next 10,000 years, as the last ice age came to an end and the sea level rose by more than 300 feet, the New Jersey coastline moved steadily west.
This alluvial coastal plain is stratified with quartz and glauconite sands, silt, clay and at least eight different aquifers going down beyond 6,000 feet before there is any semblance of solid earth — a slab of bedrock formed between 550 million and 300 million years ago. Geologists like to say that New Jersey’s coastal plain sits “unconformably” atop this Paleozoic base. […]
Stephan: We have been warned again and again that our unthinking abuse of the earth's meta-systems is going to exact a painful and catastrophic cost. How much attention do you think the world's politicians, America's politicians, are paying to reports like this one? Not enough you can be sure. So begin to think about how you are going to deal with what is happening in the region where you live.
The world ocean Credit: AFP/NASA
A massive Atlantic Ocean current system, which affects climate, sea levels and weather systems around the world, may be about to be fatally disrupted.
A new report in the journal Nature Climate Change describes how a series of Atlantic Ocean currents have reached “an almost complete loss of stability over the last century” as the planet continues to warm. The report, authored by Dr. Niklas Boers, specifically analyzes data on ocean temperature and salinity to demonstrate that their circulation has weakened over the past few decades. If current trends continue unabated, they may slow to a dangerous level or even shut down entirely.
The series of currents in question is known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC for short. The current system is sometimes likened to a series of conveyer belts: one “belt” flows north with warm water that, upon reaching the northern Atlantic, cools and evaporates, in the process increasing the salinity of water in that region. The saltier water becomes colder and heavier, sinking and flowing south to create a second “belt.” Those two currents are in turn connected by other […]
Sabrina Tavernise, Tariro Mzezewa and Giulia Heyward, National Correspondents and Reporting Fellow - The New York Times
Stephan: I am sure you have noticed how many television ads portray mixed-race couples, and multi-racial children. This is what is happening as the United States becomes a majority-minority nation and, as the 2020 census describes, and it is the existential nightmare of White supremacists.
WASHINGTON — The Census Bureau released a surprising finding this week: The number of non-Hispanic Americans who identify as multiracial had jumped by 127 percent over the decade. For people who identified as Hispanic, the increase was even higher.
The spike sent demographers scrambling. Was the reason simply that more multiracial babies were being born? Or that Americans were rethinking their identities? Or had a design change in this year’s census form caused the sudden, unexpected shift?
The answer, it seems, is all of the above.
Multiracial Americans are still a relatively small part of the population — just 4 percent — but the increase over the decade was substantial and, the data shows, often surprising in its geography. The number of Americans who identified as non-Hispanic and more than one race jumped to 13.5 million from 6 million. The largest increase in non-Hispanic Americans of two or more races was in Oklahoma, followed by Alaska and Arkansas.
Americans who were mixed race recorded a wide range of identities. People who identified themselves as both white and Asian made up about 18 percent of the total number of non-Hispanic multiracial Americans in 2020. Those who reported their race as both white and Black accounted […]
