This morning I got an email from a reader in Florida saying, “Stephan, you are so right-on about the insurance trend you have been warning us about, and that I just experienced. Friday, my Christmas gift from my 20-year home insurance company was that they would not extend coverage, and my policy would end in January.” Here is further confirmation of what is happening. If you live on a coastline this trend may be headed your way.
Clayton Aldern / Grist
Five hurricanesmade landfall in the United States this year, causing half a trillion dollars in damages. Flooding devastated mountain towns along the East Coast. Scores of wildfires burned almost 8 million acres nationwide. As such events grow more common, and more devastating, homeowners are seeing their insurance premiums spike — or insurers ditch them all together.
An analysis released Wednesday by the Senate Committee on the Budget found that the rate at which insurance contracts are being dropped rose significantly in recent years, particularly in states most exposed to climate risks. In all, 1.9 million policies were not renewed.
“Climate change is no longer just an environmental problem,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who chairs the budget committee, said at a hearing Wednesday. “It is an economic threat, and it is an affordability issue that we should not ignore.”
As I frequently do I agree with Thom Hartmann’s call for some spine in the Democratic Party. As I have watched the last several weeks of the news on the Congress what has stood out for me is the spinelessness of the Democratic Congress members. They are all patting each other on the back for the budget extension success. And, yes, that was a sort of win. But where is the lack of action to curb the oligarchs who are taking over control of our government? Why were AOC, and Elizabeth Warren the only Democrats, along with independent Bernie Sanders, the only members calling out for something to be done about the oligarchs? Where isn’t a new generation of leadership being put forward in the Democrat Party? Once again, I think, the only thing that is going to change this is millions of Americans nonviolently but passionately out in the streets, demanding that the United States return to being a democracy fostering wellbeing.
Credit: Daily Kos
Monday morning MSNBC and CNN (and, presumably, Fox, etc.) gave Trump roughly 40 minutes of live television time to rant and lie, threaten an Iowa newspaper and pollster, propose privatizing our Post Office, and muse about ending schoolchildren’s vaccine mandates for polio.
Everybody watching cable TV probably saw it; it was later the topic of numerous newscasts and newspaper articles that are still echoing across the news space.
Around the same time, President Joe Biden spoke at the inauguration of the Francis Perkins National Monument to FDR’s famous Labor Secretary and principal author of the New Deal. He truthfully pointed out that his one four-year administration had helped create 16 million new jobs, more than any single presidential term in history (and more than the jobs created by the Bush Sr., Bush Jr., and Trump administrations combined).
The cable networks chose to completely ignore Biden’s speech. As did the rest of the nation’s media. So, I get it, there’s a strong media bias in favor of Trump (“What new outrageous thing will he say? OMG! Click bait!!!”) and generally […]
Annabel P. Matison, Anbupalam Thalamuthu, Victoria M. Flood, Vibeke S. Catts, Kaare Christensen, Marianne Nygaard, Nancy L. Pedersen, Perminder S. Sachdev, Simone Reppermund, Karen A. Mather, IGEMS Consortium - Scientific Reports
Stephan:
This is a very existentially depressing time in the history of the United States. For that reason, it is more important than ever, particularly if you are older, that you eat enough fruit and vegetables. Here is the research that substantiates this linkage with your wellbeing.
Abstract
Beneficial associations between higher fruit and vegetable intakes and risk of depression appear to exist but few studies have focused on adults aged 45 + years and the potential that associations are due to residual confounding has not been tested. This longitudinal study of twins (n = 3483, age 45–90 years) from Australia, Denmark, Sweden and USA, assessed the associations between baseline fruit/vegetable intake and depressive symptoms over 5–11 years using linear mixed effects models. Intakes from food frequency questionnaires were trichotomized. Depressive symptoms were assessed using validated measures. The co-twin method was used to examine familial confounding. Compared with low intakes, both high fruit and high vegetable intakes were associated with lower depressive symptoms (fruit: β -.007 [95%CI − .014, < − .001], p = .040; vegetables: β − .006 [95%CI -.011, -.002], p = .002); whereas only moderate vegetable intakes, were associated with lower depressive symptoms (vegetables: β − .005 [95%CI − .009, − .001], p = .014). No familial confounding was found for vegetables, while the results for fruit were inconclusive, likely due to smaller sample size and the marginal significance of the main result. Higher fruit and vegetable intakes may protect against depressive symptoms, presenting another argument for increasing intakes in adults aged 45 + years.
The christofascist Supreme Court majority engineered by Leonard Leo, Mitch McConnell and Trump, has produced the most corrupt court in the history of the United States. Not only corrupt but incredibly arrogant. They have no ethic standards they are required to meet and they don’t give a damn what anyone thinks because they have lifetime appointments. One of the things the Democrats in the Senate should be planning for the new Congress is how they can impose ethical standards on these creeps, and how they can create term limits so these scum can be forced off the court. This is why the Democrats need a spine and new leadership.
The gifts lavished upon Thomas ‘have no comparison in modern American history’, according to the report. Credit: Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters
A nearly two-year investigation by Democratic senators of supreme court ethics details more luxury travel by Justice Clarence Thomas and urges Congress to establish a way to enforce a new code of conduct.
Any movement on the issue appears unlikely as Republicans prepare to take control of the Senate in January, underscoring the hurdles in imposing restrictions on a separate branch of government even as public confidence in the court has fallen to record lows.
The 93-page report released on Saturday by the Democratic majority of the Senate judiciary committee found additional travel taken in 2021 by Thomas but not reported on his annual financial disclosure form: a private jet flight to New York’s Adirondacks in July and a jet and yacht trip to New York City sponsored by billionaire Harlan Crow in October, one of more than two dozen times detailed in the report that Thomas took luxury travel and gifts from wealthy benefactors.
The court adopted its first code of ethics in 2023, […]
Senator Bernie Sanders is one of the few people in Congress who tells the truth about what has happened not only in the UNited States, but around the world. Most of the world’s economy is controlled by a handful of uber-rich, and they don’t give a damn about you or your family. You are the equivalent of cattle, to be herded in the direction the oligarchs want you to go, and to be maintained as cheaply as they can. I completely agree with what Sanders is saying. Instead of the tax cuts the MAGAt Republicans are trying pass, I think there should be a massive increase, back to the pre-Reagan era, on the tax rate of theses oligarchs. These Republicans are terrified of Musk because he could put $10-20 million into any Congress member’s election in 2026 to fund their opponent. I think it should also be noted that the oligarchs are no longer pay allegiance to any country. They have international wealth, and are funding and supporting organizations and movements that serve their interests all over the world. Musk, for instance, is supporting neo-Nazis in Germany.
Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders Credit: Joe Maher / Getty
“My friends, you don’t have to be a PhD in political science to understand that this is not democracy. This is not one person, one vote. This is not all of us coming together to decide our future. This is oligarchy.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is escalating his fight against the U.S. oligarchy with a new campaign directed at the nation’s wealthiest individuals—including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—who he says are key culprits in a global race to the bottom that is stripping people worldwide of political agency while impoverishing billions so that the rich can amass increasingly obscene levels of wealth.
Announcing a new series that will detail how “billionaire oligarchs” in the U.S. “manipulate the global economy, purchase our elections, avoid paying taxes, and increasingly control our government,” Sanders said in a Friday night video address that it makes him laugh when mainstream pundits talk openly about the nefarious oligarchic structures in other places, but refuse to acknowledge the issue in domestic terms.
