Stephan: Here is some more good news about food production. I think about this a lot because I cannot get one in seven American children have hunger issues out of my mind. How can a country have people so rich they can run their own space programs, more than one, yet hundreds of thousands of children -- the living future of America -- don't have enough to eat?
Millions of people in the US experience food insecurity on a daily basis. This problem has been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has pushed the total number of Americans experiencing hunger to an estimated 42 million people, many of whom live in urban food deserts which lack adequate access to fresh and affordable food.
With the aim of tackling this urgent issue, creative agency Framlab has developed Glasir — a conceptual project which involves building groups of modular vertical farms to provide low-income neighborhoods with access to fresh produce.
Glasir takes the form of greenhouse-like cubes designed to be installed anywhere in the city where there would be room for a standard tree. The target, however, is to build them in food deserts, where there is an infrastructure barrier to nutritious and affordable food.
The system runs on renewable energy and rainwater, and it even helps reduce air pollution using an outer layer on the greenhouse modules. “There’s a chemical process catalyzed by sunlight that would allow the material to break down air pollutants,” architect Andreas Tjeldflaat tells euronews, adding that his ambition is “to confront environmental harm and social inequality within our food […]
Stephan: One very negative but almost never discussed aspect of the anti-vaxxer, anti-masker movement is the impact these people are having on the nation's healthcare system. American hospitals, particularly in Red value states where vaccination rates are low, are on the verge of collapse because 95% of the people crowding those hospitals are anti-vaxxers and anti=maskers, who have sabotaged those hospitals' functioning because of their stupidity. As a result, healthcare workers are fed up, and tired of risking their lives to care for people who wouldn't be there if they had just gotten vaccinated.
Just as the pandemic has fuelled a burnout crisis among frontline medical staff, it has been calamitous for the mental health of workers in public health. Credit: Rex/Shutterstock
Alexandra was working in the public health emergencies unit in a major north-eastern American city when the first wave of the pandemic hit. Although her job was in public health policy research, and not treating Coovid-19 patients on the frontlines of the healthcare system, she recalls the spring of 2020 as a blur of 24-hour shifts.
Beginning last March, Alexandra estimates that she and her colleagues worked the equivalent of three full-time years in 12 months. (Her name has been changed to protect anonymity.)
“There was no overtime, there was no hazard pay,” Alexandra recalls. Throughout the public health department where she worked, symptoms of anxiety, depression and stress-related physical maladies were commonplace among staff.
This summer, despite the protestations of her superiors, Alexandra quit. She says she’s one of roughly 25 staff members who have left the department since the start of the pandemic.
Alexandra’s story is not unique. Just as the pandemic has fuelled a […]
Stephan: Corruption is not partisan, and this is a very important point to always keep in mind. Corrupters will rent Congressmembers of whatever party willing to whore for them so they can get what they want. It is my opinion that all elections should be publicly financed, and it should be a felony to give an elected official money, both corrupter and recipient should be guilty, and the elected official should have to leave office and be ineligible to ever hold a public office again.
The Pentagon Credit: AFP/Getty
In a bipartisan 316-113 vote on Thursday night, the U.S. House authorized a $778 billion military budget for fiscal year 2022. Every Republican voted against two amendments to reduce Pentagon spending, but Democrats were split, and a new analysis reveals that lawmakers who rejected the proposed cuts received far more campaign cash from the weapons industry than those who supported the cuts.
“Our biggest problems can’t be solved by more ships, planes, or missiles.” —Lindsay Koshgarian, IPS
One amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), introduced by Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), would have slashed the overall spending authorization level by 10%, exempting the paychecks and health benefits of military personnel and the Defense Department’s federal civilian workforce.
The measure failed by a tally of 86-332. According to an analysis of OpenSecrets data by the Security Policy Reform Institute (SPRI) and Sludge, the Democrats who voted against the 10% Pentagon budget cut have taken, on average, 3.7 times more campaign money from arms manufacturers since January 2019 than the Democrats who voted for it.
Sludge‘s Donald Shaw and SPRI’s Stephen Semler wrote Friday that “the […]
Stephan: One of the things that the Covid pandemic has brought into sharp focus is the illusion of independence that informs so much of right-wing thinking. It is central to the MAGAt worldview and, as the pandemic has shown us, it is horribly selfish, rather stupid, and wrong. John Alexander makes this point very well.
Trump and his MAGAts
There lies in America a deeply held myth. It is ever prevalent. It is a basic premise of many of our beliefs and stated values. And, it is wrong.
It is the myth of individual independence. There can be little doubt that the concepts of separateness and independence of action are illusions. Yet, far too many Americans believe that they function as totally separate entities with inalienable rights that grant them authority to do most anything they wish, albeit with some prescribed limits. They actually believe that their creative endeavors emerge solely from their individual efforts.
Repeatedly, we hear the stories of “self-made” men and women. The reality is that they could only achieve their accomplishments because they are immersed in a multitude of supportive infrastructures, ones without which none of those achievements might come to fruition.
When President Obama made the controversial statement, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,” he was roundly chastised. The attacks came primarily from Republicans, who still tenaciously cling to the mythology of […]
Stephan: How did the Ivermectin nonsense get started? I think that is important to understand, because the weaponization of disinformation for political purposes, is shaping our culture right now. Here is a pretty good exegetic essay on this.
People opposed to COVID-19 vaccines often embrace ivermectin, a drug they think is not getting the attention it deserves. Here, an anti-vaccination protester takes part in a rally against vaccine mandates last month in Santa Monica, Calif. Credit: Ringo Chiu/AFP/Getty
Through July and August, Julie Smith watched her husband, Jeffrey, get worse and worse from COVID-19. In early July, the healthy outdoorsman, 51, had tested positive for the coronavirus. Within a week, he was admitted to the intensive care unit at a hospital near their home in the suburbs of Cincinnati.
The hospital treated him with antiviral drugs, convalescent plasma and steroids, but he continued to decline. Weeks later he was on a ventilator in a medically induced coma — “on death’s doorstep,” Julie Smith wrote in a legal complaint filed Aug. 20.
Smith felt the hospital had given up on her husband, but she could not, according to the complaint. After doing research on the internet, she sued the hospital to require it to treat her husband with ivermectin — an inexpensive anti-parasitic drug that’s been used to cure […]
