Here, in my opinion, is a very insightful article by a Boomer generation writer about his generation. I am not a Boomer being older, but I lived through and remember the history of that generation, and consider it a tragic one for the reasons James Risen lays out in his exegetic essay. History is not going to treat the Boomers well.
Criminal Trump drives a golf cart at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, N.J. Credit: Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty
When the obituary of the baby-boom generation is finally written, they’ll have to mention Donald Trump in the very first paragraph to explain how a cohort that began with such idealism and promise turned so toxic.
The generation that took to the streets in anti-war protests and civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s and championed the environmental and women’s movements in the 1970s has now retreated to right-wing retirement enclaves in Florida, where Fox News is always on in the background. Boomers drove jam-packed VW vans in a haze of drugs to Woodstock; now they scoot around The Villages in golf carts festooned with Trump flags.
The boomer rallying cry of the 1960s was “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Boomers today can’t stop whining about how young people are too “woke.”
I’m a baby boomer myself, and I no longer recognize my own generation. A big slice of white boomers are now living on hate. They hate nearly everything and everybody […]
Michael Sasso, - Bloomberg. News / Microsoft Start
Stephan:
Here is an interesting report on what has been happening to population movements over the last few years largely as a result of housing prices and mortgage rates going dramatically up. People are moving into the South, particularly Texas and Florida, two of the most poorly governed states in the Union. I am going to pay close attention to what effect these movementa have on politics in the states where people are moving. I am also going to watch for people moving out of those states as climate change more dramatically alters our environment and states like Florida begin to have large sections of the state go underwater.
Americans’ decades-long love affair with the US West appears to be souring as high housing costs in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle encourage migration to the South, a new analysis shows.
The share of the US population living in the West grew steadily over the decades before peaking at about 23.8% in 2019. Since then it flattened and began to decline, reaching 23.6% last year, according to a Bank of America Institute report citing US Census Bureau data.
The South, despite a slight dip in 2020, has continued to grow to its current 38.9% share of the nation’s population. The shares of Americans living in the Northeast and Midwest continued their decades-long slides.
The bank attributes much of the West’s migration woes to unaffordable housing. There’s a close relationship between a metropolitan area’s median mortgage payment and that area’s change of population last year, the bank’s research shows. Mortgage payments in Pacific Coast metropolitan areas all exceed payments in other regions.
Generally, the loss of population “is more of a Pacific story,” since more inland metro areas […]
OLIVIA OLANDER, MACKENZIE WILKES, KATY O'DONNELL, DANIEL PAYNE and RUTH READER, - Politico
Stephan:
Here is a good overview of what AI is doing to U.S. society. It is much more extensive and pervasive than I think most Americans realize, and we are just at the beginning of this transition.
Illustrations by Anna Kim / Politico
Artificial intelligence isn’t just a niche tool for cheating on homework or generating bizarre and deceptive images. It’s already humming along in unseen and unregulated ways that are touching millions of Americans who may never have heard of ChatGPT, Bard or other buzzwords.
A growing share of businesses, schools, and medical professionals have quietly embraced generative AI, and there’s really no going back. It is being used to screen job candidates, tutor kids, buy a home and dole out medical advice.
The Biden administration is trying to marshal federal agencies to assess what kind of rules make sense for the technology. But lawmakers in Washington, state capitals and city halls have been slow to figure out how to protect people’s privacy and guard against echoing the human biases baked into much of the data AIs are trained on.
“There are things that we can use AI for that will really benefit people, but there are lots of ways that AI can harm people and perpetuate inequalities and discrimination that we’ve […]
Silja J.A. Talvi , Investigative Journalist - truthout
Stephan:
The United States has and has had for decades the largest number of people incarcerated in the world — roughly 1.8 million men and women at the end of 2023. And the conditions in American prisons are amongst the worst in the developed world and getting worse. Here is a major trend that is going on in U.S. prisons. I find it humiliating for the country and yet another example of how poorly the U.S. government federally and at the state level functions.
Illustration by Ayo Walker for truthout
Every morning, Mary Frances Barbee wakes up and experiences a “microsecond of happiness before the terror sets in.”
Barbee had a heart attack, transient ischemic attack and then a stroke after her sons were incarcerated. She puts on a brave front when they call.
“I wonder what they are going through, will they be able to call today, and how long until they are out of lockdown again,” Barbee, 71, says as she chokes back tears. “Will it be for just three hours after many days or weeks locked inside? They have no exercise. Four, six or 12 days without a shower. It is inhumane treatment on a daily basis.”
What Barbee is living through is something that millions of people inside and outside razor wire are also experiencing: The purgatory of endless prison “lockdowns” where prisoners are forced to live in isolation that typically exceeds punitive segregation conditions.
An exclusive, eight-month investigation for Truthout has revealed that at least 33 U.S. state prison systems and the majority of federal medium-, high- and maximum-security prisons […]
Here is some more good news about what is becoming a growing trend in American agriculture. With all the bad news we all see every day this trend is one of the positive wellbeing fostering developments.
A purple daikon radish grown at Ollin Farms in Longmont, Colo., and other vegetables are prepared to be served at a meeting to discuss support for small Colorado farmers Credit: Rachel Woolf for NPR
In a chilly storeroom piled high with fall produce, Jimena Cordero is chopping up vegetables and fanning them out onto trays.
Cordero is the farm manager at Ollin Farms, not far from Boulder, Colo. — she’s put together bright pink and purple radishes, apple, fresh turnips.
“This is a green luobo,” she explains, as she expertly cuts the oblong radish into rounds.
These locally grown vegetables aren’t just pretty. They’re being prepared to make a case to state lawmakers at a meeting later that afternoon.
“You can have a super colorful veggie tray for a meeting, and everybody can get on the same vibration, eating the same good, healthy food,” says Cordero’s dad, Mark Guttridge, who started this farm with his wife, Kena, 17 years ago.
That vibration and the good, healthy food are part of the case Guttridge wants to make that farmers can play an […]
