Stephan: Here are some good New Year's resolutions you might consider.
Now more than ever, it’s important to include the planet in our resolution plans. Credit: Erik McGregor / LightRocket / Getty
As we welcome in the new year, many are thinking about resolutions – for ourselves, our families, our health, our lifestyle. Now more than ever, it’s important to include the planet in our plans. Over the past 50 years, humans have more than doubled our consumption of natural resources, particularly in the United States.
Losing our resources is directly linked to our own health as well, as the World Health Organization reports that 13 million deaths annually and nearly 25 percent of disease worldwide are due to environmental causes. Climate challenges impact health issues like asthma, cardiovascular disease and stroke.
So, how can you do your part and live your best life while ensuring future generations will be able to live theirs?
Stephan: Over 40% of MAGAt world supports some kind of secession; this is an important trend that is not getting enough attention because it seems so preposterous. This article gives a good sense of the thinking of secessionists. Several things stand out that I think you should take note of. First, the correlation of secession movements and guns. As the article points out 85% of the people in Harney County, Oregon go around carrying concealed weapons. I cannot even imagine living in an area like that.
Second, the correlation between "rural" values and White supremacy. Secessionism is a deeply racist movement.
Third, the willful ignorance of the secessionists. The only way these secessionist counties and states are able to survive is by the largess given them by the federal government from the tax dollars provided by the Blue states the secessionists despise.
In the summer of 2015, a chimney sweep in Elgin, Oregon, redrew the map of the American West. “Imagine for a moment Idaho’s western border stretching to the Pacific Ocean,” Grant Darrow wrote in a letter to the editor of his local paper. Rural Oregon, he insisted, should break its ties with the urbanites of Portland and liberals of Salem, and join Idaho. “The political diversity in this state is becoming unpalatable,” he argued. “Rural Oregonians in general and Eastern Oregonians in particular are growing increasingly dismayed by the manner in which Oregon’s Legislature and Oregon’s urban dwellers have marginalized their values, demonized their lifestyle, villainized their resource-based livelihoods, and classified them as second-class citizens at best.”
In the half decade or so since Darrow’s diatribe, a simple and outlandish idea, percolating in rural Oregon since the 1960s—what if we were just Idaho?—has grown into a grassroots secession movement. Last month, Harney County, in the high desert of eastern Oregon, became the […]
Stephan: If you read me regularly you know that I have been covering the Republican trend of skewing the American judiciary away from a nonpartisan egalitarian system to one where the judges are partisan, and the whole system is biased to a MAGAt world view. Here is an assessment of what that has meant.
Then-President Donald Trump greets Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch ahead of the State of the Union address in the chamber of the US House of Representatives on February 4, 2020 Credit: Mario Tama/Getty
No one has ever elected Matthew Kacsmaryk to anything.
Kacsmaryk, whom former President Donald Trump appointed to the federal bench in 2019, was previously a lawyer for a Christian right law firm. He once claimed being transgender is a “mental disorder” and that gay people are “disordered.” He’s also one of the most powerful immigration officials in the country, having successfully wrested control of much of America’s border policy away from the man Americans elected president in 2020.
With the Supreme Court’s blessing, Kacsmaryk ordered President Joe Biden’s administration to reinstate Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which requires many asylum seekers who arrive at the United States’ southern border to stay in Mexico while they await a hearing.
Even if you ignore the moral implications of reinstating such a policy, there are good reasons to doubt that the policy is a […]
Stephan: Here is a view of national a security that I had not considered, but which is clearly a geopolitical trend of growing importance.
Nuggets made from lab-grown chicken meat are displayed during a media presentation in Singapore, the first country to allow the sale of meat created without slaughtering any animals, in December 2020. Credit: Nicholas Yeo/Getty
An important milestone went largely unnoticed at the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow this fall. President Isaac Herzog of Israel became the world’s first head of state to try “cultivated meat”—made from actual chicken cells, but without slaughtering animals. After sampling it, Herzog declared it to be delicious and said the technology was critical not just to Israel’s security, but to the entire world.
I had heard that message before. As a deputy assistant secretary of defense during the Obama administration, I met with a head of state from a country in the Middle East for highly classified war planning. It was 2013, when the Iran nuclear deal was in the works. He surprised me by saying that his worst fears were not about an Iranian nuclear weapon. Instead, he said, they were about how his country would feed itself if […]
Interview of Noam Chomsky by Amy Goodman, - Democracy Now!
Stephan: Noam Chomsky just had his 93rd birthday and here is his assessment of the U.S. today. I think he is right.
93 year old Noam ChomskyCredit: Screen capture
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we return to our discussion with world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky. Nermeen Shaikh and I recently spoke to him. He was at his home in Tucson, Arizona.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, you have called the Republican Party the most dangerous organization in human history. You’ve also called the political leaders a gang of sadists. I was wondering if you could elaborate on this. But also, in all of your 93 years, have you ever seen such an anti-science, anti-fact trend in this country before? And then, if you can talk about how it links up with other such movements around the world and how it should be dealt with?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, it’s a fact that there has been a strain of anti-science sentiment in significant parts of the United States for a long time. This is the country […]
