HILLEL ITALIE and KIMBERLEE KRUESI, Report - Associated Press
Stephan:
If it isn’t clear to you by now it should be. The United States is under a christofascist attack led by criminal Trump. Although there are some Blacks and Hispanics this is an overwhelmingly White minority cohort, and they are trying to take control of the country and think they can achieve this in November. If they do censorship, gender control, White supremacy, and indoctrination instead of education will define the American culture, and the United States will become a larger version of Hungary and Russia. Putin, Orban, and Trump will be the leaders for their lifetimes.
Tom Bober, librarian and President of the Missouri Association of School Librarians. Credit: Jeff Roberson / AP
When an illustrated edition of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” was released in 2019, educators in Clayton, Missouri needed little debate before deciding to keep copies in high school libraries. The book is widely regarded as a classic work of dystopian literature about the oppression of women, and a graphic novel would help it reach teens who struggle with words alone.
But after Missouri legislators passed a law in 2022 subjecting librarians to fines and possible imprisonment for allowing sexually explicit materials on bookshelves, the suburban St. Louis district reconsidered the new Atwood edition, and withdrew it.
“There’s a depiction of a rape scene, a handmaid being forced into a sexual act,” says Tom Bober, Clayton district’s library coordinator and president of the Missouri Association of School Librarians. “It’s literally one panel of the graphic novel, but we felt it was in violation of the law […]
Here is an important assessment showing that wellbeing is fostered by ordinary people even when the profit greed corporations and those who work within them, pour countless money into maintaining things that cause damage to the earth’s wellbeing. What it is saying is that you can make a difference. Are you willing to?
Hundreds of Native Americans and supporters protested the Dakota Access Pipeline at Lafayette Park in front of the White House on October 12, 2021, in Washington D.C. Credit: Yasin Ozturk / Anadolu Agency / Getty
Human activity in a profit-driven world divided by nation-states and those who have rights and those who don’t is the primary driver of climate change. Burning fossil fuels and destroying forests have caused inestimable environmental harm by producing a warming effect through the artificial concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide (CO2) has risen by 50 percent in the past 200 years, much of it since the 1970s, raising in turn the Earth’s temperature by roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit.
Indeed, since the 1970s, the decade which saw the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant economic ideology in the Western world, CO2 emissions have increased by about 90 percent. Unsurprisingly, average temperatures have risen more quickly over the past few decades, and the last 10 years have been the warmest years on record. In […]
As this report lays out, the U.S. is doing pathetically badly at creating a EV charging network. The plan was 500,000 charging stations by 2026; it is not going to happen, or even anything close. At both the federal and state level there is no real understanding as to how urgent this is. Personally, I think it is the wrong way to go in the first place. I don’t think the gas station model is what should be developed. I think the roads themselves should charge the vehicles that drive over them. Not every road, of course, but the bigger ones.
Liam Sawyer charges his 2023 Ford Mustang Mach-E at an electric vehicle charging station in London, Ohio, on March 8. The charging ports are a key part of President Biden’s effort to encourage drivers to move away from gasoline-powered cars and trucks. Credit: Joshua A. Bickel / AP
President Biden has long vowed to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations in the United States by 2030. Those stations, the White House said, would help Americans feel confident purchasing and driving electric cars, and help the country cut carbon pollution.
But now, more than two years after Congress allocated $7.5 billion to help build out those stations, only 7 EV charging stations are operational across four states. And as the Biden administration rolls out its new rules for emissions from cars and trucks — which will require a lot more electric cars and hybrids on the road — the sluggish build-out could slow the transition to electric cars.
“I think a lot of people who are watching this are […]
Academic freedom and fact-based education have seriously declined in the United States. If you read SR regularly you know that. What you may not realize is that degradation of education is going on all over the world as authoritarianism rises. I think all of this is happening because of the fear engendered by the precognitive unconscious awareness of what climate change is going to do to the cultures of the world. But the effect is going to be a humanity far less capable of factual understanding than in the past, and that has all kinds of negative implications.
A university protest in Hungary, which had the lowest level of academic freedom in Europe, according to an annual index Credit: AFP
Just one in three people live a nation that guarantees the independence of universities and research, according to an annual index warning that academic freedom is declining worldwide, particularly in Russia, China and India.
Attacks on freedom of expression, interference at universities and the imprisonment of researchers are just some ways that “academic freedom globally is under threat,” the index said.
The Academic Freedom Index — based on input from more than 2,300 experts in 179 countries — was published last month as part of a report on democracy by the V-Dem Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg.
It measures changes in higher education and research over the last half century by looking at five different indicators: freedom of research and teaching; of academic exchange; of academic and cultural expression; of institutional autonomy and campus integrity.
I have been telling you for over 20 years that water is destiny. I did one of my recent podcasts on this. Now, as this article describes a group of water studying scientists have put together a book on the future scenarios they see. It is even bleaker than my own research had suggested. Governments, throughout the world, including the United States, are simply not taking what is happening with water seriously enough. Basically, they can’t get past short-term greed. The price for this stupidity and short-sightedness, as these scientists describe, is going to be horrific.
An artist-generated image illustrating possible futures in policy and research due to human modifications of the atmospheric water cycle. Credit: Patrick Keys and Fabio Comin / Interesting Engineering
The line between science and fiction blurs when it comes to the Earth’s water cycle. Humanity’s relentless intervention is transforming this delicate balance, leaving scenes of arid landscapes and failing crops a preview of a far more dire future. Land development disrupts rainfall patterns. Desperation fuels experimentation with cloud seeding, bending the weather to human will. The stuff of dystopian novels is fast becoming our inconvenient reality.
To grasp the magnitude of these changes, a team led by Colorado State University’s Assistant Professor Patrick Keys has embarked on a daring experiment. They’ve enlisted water scientists from around the globe to use the power of storytelling to create chilling visions of our potential futures. This unique effort is a desperate bid to understand the far-reaching consequences of our actions.
