Fiona Harvey, Environment Correspondent - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: The warnings come in almost every day. They all tell us the same thing: We are not doing enough to prepare for what climate change is doing, not going to do, already doing. I think that at least in the United States this is going to get down to what individuals do. Have you done the research you need to do to know what to do? Are you living in the right place, are you doing the necessary things to keep yourself and your family safe? It is up to you to keep yourself safe and well.
Activists dressed as world leaders protest beside Glasgow’s Forth and Clyde canal against rising water levels during the Cop26 summit. Credit: Dylan Martinez / Reuters
The policies currently in place to tackle the climate crisis around the world will lead to “catastrophic” climate breakdown, as governments have failed to take the actions needed to fulfil their promises, three former UN climate leaders have warned.
But the policies and measures passed and implemented by governments would lead to far greater temperature rises, of at least 2.7C, well beyond the threshold of relative safety, and potentially as much as 3.6C. That would have “catastrophic” impacts, in the form of extreme weather, sea-level rises […]
Stephan: What I do not understand, and I admit it, is why the American people are so complacent, so submissive to the illness-profit healthcare systsem when its inferiority, as shown by hard data, is so obvious.
A man prepares pills for his wife on January 4, 2020 in Sarasota, Florida. (Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis /Getty
Research published Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA estimates that close to half of all new brand-name prescription drugs launched in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021 came with an original price tag of at least $150,000 a year, a finding that sparked fresh calls for Congress to rein in the pharmaceutical industry’s virtually unchecked power to drive up costs.
“Prescription drug spending in the U.S. exceeded half a trillion dollars in 2020.”
Authored by researchers with the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the new analysis finds that “from 2008 to 2021, launch prices for new drugs increased exponentially by 20% per year.”
“In 2020-2021, 47% of new drugs were initially priced above $150,000 per year,” the researchers wrote. “The trend in prices for new drugs outpaces growth in prices for other healthcare services.”
The study also shows that median launch prices of prescription drugs soared from $2,115 per year in 2008 to a staggering $180,007 in 2021.
Stephan: This is my take on the weaponization of lies. White supremacy, male dominance, christofascism through the internet and social media. It is a major trend shaping our culture.
Lies — misinformation or disinformation in its polite academic and media dress — fills the news today. Endless stories of lying Congress members, dark money PACs spreading conspiracy theories, media’s deliberate use of misinformation. Not a day goes by without some headline in this realm. The use of such information, however, is not new, although it has never been as prevalent as it is today. Promoting fake news is an ancient tool of power. The weaponization of misinformation for such purposes dates back to Babylon at least 3,000 years ago according to research done by Martin Worthington, a fellow at St. John’s College at Cambridge University.
Worthington is an Assyriologist who specializes in Babylonian grammar, literature, and medicine, and he describes the first example he found in Babylonian literature, “Ea (a Babylonian god) tricks humanity by spreading fake news. He tells the Babylonian Noah, known as Uta–napishti, to promise his people that food will rain from the sky if they help him build the ark. What the people don’t realize is that Ea’s nine-line message is a trick: it is a sequence of sounds that can be understood in radically different ways, like English ‘ice cream’ and ‘I scream’. 1
Charlie Sykes, Founder and Editor-at-large of the Bulwark - MSNBC
Stephan: Please read this. It is very important that those of us who want to see intelligent gun control and democracy prevail, realize how really deranged the Republican position held by 44% of the party on this is. What I mean by that is starting with getting AR-15 style weapons off the streets. Being found with one after some kind of buyback, or other program, should be a felony carrying perhaps a year in prison, and being listed. It is insane to have a group, 44% of whom think mass murders even of children is just the cost of a free society, as they see it. And this same group is wandering around with weapons that can decapitate a child, seething in their fear, racism, and male insecurity.
To get the actual poll report: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mLulXV9rXGLevVOI_XnHJBYsWd_CVqLq/view
Recent polling gives us a glimpse of how broken America’s discourse on guns has become. Credit: Getty
Forty-four percent of GOP voters say that “we have to accept” the slaughter of children on a more or less regular basis, because they are the collateral damage of living in a free society.
Don’t slide past that poll number, because it gives us a glimpse of how broken our discourse has become, when weapons become fetishes of manhood and guns designed to blow human beings apart are embraced as symbols of “freedom.”
There is no confusion or misunderstanding here, because the wording of the question was clear and blunt (“Do you feel that mass shootings are___”), and the memories of the murders in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York, were still fresh. Media reports were still […]
Stephan: I told you the week of the invasion that there were two things going on with the war that were not being properly appreciated. (See SR archive, search on "Putin".) First, Putin is not stupid, just reptilian. You're a dictator and possibly the richest man in the world, and you know it all depends on petroleum and gas, which Europe and other nations are committing to stop using for transportation by 2035. What do you do? Why you try to take over Ukraine, of course. With it resources and grains you're economy can be revitalized. And rebuilding the country will require millions of workers and generate wealth. To make it work with the peasants you garb the whole thing in mythology, based on deep-seated religious historical-cultural thought forms.
Over the past hundred days Putin has confirmed all of that, culminating in this.
Peter the Great and Vladimir Putin
Reading Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mind is rarely a straightforward task, but on occasion the Kremlin leader makes it easy.
Such was the case on Thursday, when Putin met with a group of young Russian entrepreneurs. Anyone looking for clues as to what Putin’s endgame for Ukraine might be should read the transcript, helpfully released here in English.
Putin’s words speak for themselves: What he is aiming for in Ukraine is the restoration of Russia as an imperial power.
Many observers quickly picked up on one of Putin’s more provocative lines, in which he compared himself to Peter the Great, Russia’s modernizing tsar and the founder of St. Petersburg — Putin’s own birthplace — who came to power in the late 17th century.
“Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years,” a relaxed and apparently self-satisfied Putin said. “On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it… He was not taking away anything, he was returning. This […]
