Stephan: Here is some good climate news, and proof that when the nations of the world make even a small attempt to recognize the matrix of consciousness and improve things, it makes a big difference. Now if the leaders of the world will wake up to this maybe we can avert some the disaster climate change portends.
Snapshot of the Antarctic ozone hole Credit: NASA
There are many reasons to worry about climate change’s effects and whether the world’s leaders are brave enough to make the bold decisions necessary to abate the growing crisis. But a new report from the United Nations shows that when people come together and follow the science, it’s possible to stop environmental disasters before they happen.
An executive assessment from the UN has found that the hole in the Earth’s ozone layer is on track to be completely healed within the next two decades. If current policies remain in place, the ozone layer should recover to 1980 levels by around 2066 in the Antarctic, 2045 in the Arctic and 2040 throughout the rest of the world.
The hole was first discovered by scientists in 1985 above Antarctica and it caused immediate worry. According to Discover magazine, the ozone layer acts as the planet’s sunscreen and without it, we’d be exposed to harmful ultraviolet rays that cause skin cancer and cataracts. The radiation […]
Sonali Kolhatkar, Award-winning Multimedia Journalist. - Raw Story
Stephan: There is a very important trend taking place that until just the past few days. except for SR (see SR archives), has been getting very little public attention, and even now I don't think the long term implications are fully comprehended. As a culture we are experiencing the largest transfer of wealth from one generation to the next that has every occurred. The emergence of the Nepo babies as they are being called, a manifestation of the last fifty years since the tax laws were changed to grotesquely favor the uber-rich represent as described the creation of a permanent financial artistocracy. What it doesn't say, and what I predict, is that this is part of the emergence of a new hominid species, Homo Superior, as a result of the emerging CRISPR technology. As the Broad Institute explains it, “'CRISPR' (pronounced 'crisper') stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which are the hallmark of a bacterial defense system that forms the basis for CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology." It is going to be very expensive, and kept that way, I think, because the uber-rich are going to use it to literally make themselves a separate species, and won't want it to spread. It will include gene-lining, that is the benefits will be passed on from generation to generation. And I think it is very important to note, that at the very beginning of the new Congress the Republicans are saying they want to restrain the IRS from monitoring the the taxes of the rich. They are serving their funding masters, and step-by-step we are going into a new era way beyond what climate change is going to do.
Nepos Credit: Shutterstock
There is a common feeling that many of us have experienced in professional or academic environments, especially when we struggle against gender or racial bias. It’s called “imposter syndrome”—the feeling that one doesn’t deserve one’s position and that others will discover this lack of competence at any moment. I felt this way as a female graduate student in a science field in the 1990s. I felt it as a young journalist of color in a white-dominated industry.
The rich and the elite among us appear to feel the opposite—that they are deserving of unearned privilege. A recent series of stories in New York Magazine headlined “The Year of the Nepo Baby” has struck a chord among those who are being outed for having benefited from insider status. Nepo babies are the children of the rich and famous, the ones who are borne of naked nepotism and whose ubiquity exposes the myth of American meritocracy. Nepo babies can be found everywhere there is power.
The New York Magazine stories have predictably generated […]
Julia Conley, Staff Writer - Alter Net / Common Dreams
Stephan: Here is what political whoring looks like, and proof of what I said in my comment on the previous article. I am afraid the Republican dominated House for next two years is going to pulse on grievance and vengeance and little of consequence will take place to foster wellbeing.
Soon after the U.S. House reconvenes Monday to vote on the rules package containing many of the concessions House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made to secure to votes of far-right Republicans, the party is also expected to introduce what the new leader said early Saturday would be its “very first bill”: a proposal repealing new Internal Revenue Service funding meant to help audit the wealthiest Americans.
About $80 billion was included in the Inflation Reduction Act last year, with IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig saying the funding would only be used to increase audits of households making $400,000 per year or more.
“The resources in the reconciliation package will get us back to historical norms in areas of challenge for the agency—large corporate and global high-net-worth taxpayers,” Rettig wrote in a letter to the Senate in August.
The funding is supported by two-thirds of Americans, according to a 2021 University of Maryland poll, but McCarthy and his fellow Republicans have lambasted the Democrats’ effort to better equip the IRS to confront tax evasion by those with the highest incomes, falsely claiming President Joe Biden has provided the agency with an “army of […]
Stephan: As a result of the Powell Memorandum (see SR archive) and Citizens United, the American government is broken. Congress, particularly the Republicans in the House, is filled with cartoon characters who are basically corporate whores. Fostering wellbeing is not even part of their conversation
Detail from “Bosses of the Senate,” a famous 19th-century cartoon depicting giant monopolists dominating the U.S. Senate.
After publicly patting themselves on the backs for cutting off financial support to election deniers in the wake of the storming of the Capitol two years ago, many corporations and corporate lobbying groups are again pumping money into politicians who tried to subvert democracy, according to new reports.
Major companies “turned the spigot back on” and donated millions of dollars to election deniers using their political action committees, Mother Jones reported on Thursday.
More than half of the 70 major corporation-affiliated political action committees that vowed to pause or reconsider donations to lawmakers in the wake of the Capitol riot failed to stick to their promises, Politico reported Friday.
The companies donated more than $10 million to members who tried to block certification of the 2020 election results, Politico found in an examination of federal campaign finance filings. Those included Walmart, Comcast, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, PricewaterhouseCoopers and AT&T.
Thirty-four Fortune 100 companies pledged to suspend support for election deniers, then gave $5.4 million to election […]
