Stephan: I have been telling you for at least a decade now to watch what happens with the insurance industry as climate change develops, and look particularly at Florida. Pay attention there will come a point where the industry in its traditional form of business will collapse, and the Republicans will try to get the taxpayers to cover the costs. Why? Because if the insurance industry collapses there is be a million trillion-dollar real estate market crash, and all the uber-rich with their coastal mansions will take an enormous hit, and ordinary folk will abandon the state. Well, as this article spells out exactly what I predicted is beginning to play out.
In the three months since Hurricane Ian struck Florida, the state’s fragile property insurance market has been teetering on the brink of collapse. The historic storm caused over $50 billion in damage, more than any disaster in U.S. history other than Hurricane Katrina. It also dealt a body blow to an industry that was already struggling to stay standing: Several insurance companies had already collapsed this year even before the hurricane, and major funders are now poised to abandon those that remain.
In recognition of this crisis, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis convened the state’s Republican-controlled legislature last week for a special session devoted to stabilizing the insurance market. In a matter of days, lawmakers passed a package of bills aimed at doing so. The package includes bills that will cut down on litigation and fraudulent claims that raise costs for insurers, but it also provides insurance companies with a $1 billion public subsidy to help them stay afloat next year. That’s on top of another $2 billion the legislature rolled out earlier this […]
Stephan: From 1981 to 1993 I was very involved with the Soviet Union, and particularly Russia. I was part of a small group of Americans working in what we called Citizens' Diplomacy, a philanthropic endeavor, had three businesses, and lived there for weeks at a time. I was in Moscow when the USSR ceased to exist and hoped that a democratic future might emerge. Instead, Putin has emerged, and as I think of what Russia must now be like I am deeply saddened and wonder and worry about what has happened to all those people I knew. I have a number of Russian SR readers, and they tell me this is a pretty accurate portrait of what things are like. It is tragic.
Credit: CNN / Getty / Adobe
For Andrei Soldatov and his friends, February 24 marked the end of Russia as they knew it.
In the early hours of that day, President Vladimir Putin announced that he had ordered Russian troops into Ukraine. “And all of a sudden, everything we still believed in got completely compromised,” Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist who lives in self-imposed exile in London, told CNN.
Life in Russia had for many years been getting more difficult for dissidents, independent journalists and anyone speaking up against Putin’s regime, but Soldatov said people like him still had some hope to hold on to. The war changed that, he said.
“It was horrible to live under Putin and it was very far from the idea of democracy, but you still had some established institutions which you would almost take for granted that they would exist no matter what, and all of a sudden, everything collapsed,” he said, pointing to the near complete eradication of any remaining independent media, civil society and […]
Troy Farah, Science and Public Health Reporter - Salon
Stephan: When I was a young man taking an anthropology course as an Echols Scholar at the University of Virginia, early hominids were portrayed as brutish primitives not far evolved from say gorillas. In the years since all of that has been shown to be nonsense. We now know, for instance, that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals found each other attractive enough that they interbred, and that millions of people today have genes that trace back to their Neanderthal ancestors. We also know that our forebearer species had a sense of the continuity of consciousness, and spiritual traditions, and now we are learning that technological developments we thought specific to humans, like boats and navigation, existed long before Homo Sapiens even existed. Here is a fascinating report on that new research.
A boat approaching a small island in the Aegean Sea. Credit: George Pachantouris / Getty
Imagine ancient hominids sailing the Mediterranean hundreds of thousands of years before humans (Homo sapiens) appeared. The idea might sound bizarre: we think of boats as a human transportation technology, something that, like the wheel, our primitive ancestors developed at the dawn of civilization. So the revelation that a precursor to humans — meaning, a species of closely-related hominids that predate us — may have invented the boat and even sailed the Mediterranean long before us is a shocking proposition.
Yet that is exactly what new research suggests: hominids crossed the Mediterranean Sea much earlier than previously thought — before even Homo sapiens first appeared — which means these ancient humans must have learned how to sail nearly half a million years ago. The study prompts a shocking re-evaluation of an activity and a technology that seemed distinctly human.
The first humans and our many hominid cousins like Neanderthals originated in Africa, but it wasn’t long before we wandered […]
Stephan: If you read. me regularly you have quite possibly read one of my several essays on the rise of the Republican death cult (see SR archives). I find it quite extraordinary that Americans who are Republicans by the hundreds of thousands have committed suicide on the basis of Republican disinformation spewed out by Fox, Alex Jones, and other propaganda media outlets. The numbers are so large that it is having an effect on the share of the population who are Republican. It also shows the lack of concern the politicians in the Republican Party have for their constituents. This report spells it out.
Republican Ticking Death Bomb Illustration by Salon / Getty
Very likely the reader is wearily familiar with one of the memes that American right-wingers endlessly repeat. It’s called the “great replacement”: the claim that shadowy but apparently omnipotent elites are deliberately replacing the old stock (meaning white) American population with immigrants from predominantly non-white or non-Christian countries.
The notion had its beginnings decades ago in the mental swamps of Southern segregationist politicians and has been recycled in various iterations through white supremacist groups. Donald Trump’s election and the popularization of the phrase (in more or less coded language) by professional jackasses like Tucker Carlson made it into another of the Republican base’s innumerable slogans.
The idea is bunk, of course, and easily understood as yet another of the many myths designed to play into right-wingers’ persecution complex. But it is also possible to understand it as a folk-psychological projection of something that is indeed happening in the strongly Republican regions of the country inhabited by what Sarah Palin called “real Americans.” It’s not so much the great replacement […]
Robert Reich, Carmel P. Friesen Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California - Berkeley - Reader Supported News
Stephan: It is a measure of the corruption afflicting the American government, that a man like Clarence Thomas can sit on the highest court in the land and rule on decisions that directly affect his christofascist wife's efforts to overthrow American democracy. Robert Reich lays the issues out. Personally, I think Thomas should be impeached and removed from the court for several reasons, lack of integrity being one of them.
Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
Trump’s legal problems are mounting — with growing probability of criminal prosecutions for his attempted coup, theft of top-secret documents, and tax fraud.
You know where all this is going to end up, right? The Supreme Court.
What are the chance that Trump’s three appointees along with the two rightwing justices already on the high court when Trump was elected, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, will allow the former president to be locked up?
I can’t predict. That they were appointed by Trump or another Republican president does not pose an illegal conflict of interest.
But I’ll tell you what is clearly an illegal conflict of interest: Clarence Thomas’s continued participation in any case arising from Trump’s attempted coup.
A federal law — 28 U.S. Code § 455 — requires that “any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”
If Thomas fails to recuse himself from the Moore v. Harper case currently before the Court, he will be breaking that law. The bogus “independent […]
