We are a country in desperate shape. For nearly two hundred years we have been a two-party democracy, The parties have changed names but the agreement was that both parties supported democracy and demanded a level of integrity. That is no longer the case. The Republican Party has become a White nationalist christofascist cult and, as a result, we have a dysfunctional Congress that is literally about to close down the federal government. Worse, our wealth inequality has become so great that a group of oligarchs has evolved whose sole interest is to be in control, and because we have legalized bribery, they have completely corrupted the Congress. As a result of all this, we no longer are a country that fosters wellbeing as it highest priority. Average families can’t even buy a home, as this article describes. The Democrats have many flaws but they, at least, still do adhere to fostering wellbeing. The biggest problem is a large portion of the population supports the Republicans and that makes the country violent and dysfunctional. This all now hinges on the 2024 election. How it goes will determine what kind of nation the United States will be in the future. You better do what you can to get everyone you know and they know from 18 on to vote only for Democrats. Not that, as I said, they are perfect, but the Republicans are an unmitigated disaster, if wellbeing and democracy are what you want.
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The typical American cannot afford to buy a home in a growing number of communities across the nation, according to common lending standards.
That’s the main takeaway from a new report from real estate data provider ATTOM. Researchers examined the median home prices last year for roughly 575 U.S. counties and found that home prices in 99% of those areas are beyond the reach of the average income earner, who makes $71,214 a year, according to ATTOM..
Housing experts point to couple trends driving up housing costs. Mortgage rates have topped 7%, adding hundreds of dollars per month to a potential house payment. At the same time, homeowners who locked in at lower mortgage rates during the pandemic have opted not to sell out of fear of having to buy another property at today’s elevated rates, depleting the supply of homes for sale.
“The only people who are selling right now are people who really need to move because of a life event — divorce, marriage, new baby, new job, […]
We have got to end this puerile schoolyard acrimony going on in the House. We don’t have time for the MAGAt nonsense, as this article should make clear to the dimmest. We have got to each of us think: what can I do to foster wellbeing?
Wild Puku antelopes in Botswana. Credit: Peter Charlesworth / LightRocket / Getty
Earth’s sixth mass extinction is already happening — and it is rapidly accelerating, researchers warned in a study out this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal.
Why it matters: The study adds to a growing understanding of how humans have — often negatively — impacted Earth’s trajectory.
What they found: The study noted that animal species are going extinct at rates 35 times faster than the historical norm over the past million years.
Researchershighlighted the role of humans in the phenomenon, noting that animal species lost in the past 500 years would have taken about 18,000 to go extinct in the absence of humans.
Habitat destruction, illegal trade and climate disruption will likely continue to drive extinction rate acceleration in the coming decades, the study added.
The mass loss of animal species means losing a record of the planet’s evolutionary history andpotential, and will have ramifications for humans, Gerardo Ceballos, the study’s lead author, told Axios.
“There is life on the planet because of the plants and animals — […]
On the basis of objectively verifiable data Ron DeSantis, is a somewhat worse governor of Florida than if your dog had gotten elected. Everything in touches wilts or dies. The libraries in Florida have been debased, the schools and universities are losing a significant percentage of their teachers, the largest employer in the state, Disney, has been locked in a series of lawsuits with DeSantis costing the state millions, the insurance industry is abandoning the state, the LGBTQ community is migrating out of the state, gun deaths are going up, healthcare is going down. His culture war, as this article describes, is costing taxpayers millions. and on and on.
MAGAt Republican Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis Credit: Brandon Bell / Getty
Ron DeSantis has hinged his struggling presidential campaign on how he successfully passed a battery of ultraconservative laws in Florida. But what he doesn’t like to mention is the millions of taxpayer dollars he has wasted as courts repeatedly knock those laws down.
The Republican-controlled state legislature has helped DeSantis easily take on some of the right’s favorite culture wars. He gutted abortion rights, LGBTQ protections, and academic freedom. He also has been locked in a bizarre legal back-and-forth with Disney for the past year. He has repeatedly held up these accomplishments as signs of success.
In reality, DeSantis has spent more than $17 million defending his terrible laws in court since he took office. As a result, the state budget for 2023 includes a $15.8 million allotment just to defend his policies.
That allotment includes $6 million for the governor’s office, compared to just $1.6 million last year. The State University System Board of Governors received an extra $2 million to defend […]
This is Trump world. This is what Trump has done to American society. The news about him and the people associated with him is like reading a satire novel. So absurd, so sleazy, so willfully ignorant. And yet day after day this stuff runs like a series. I don’t like this series, and I am tired of it. What do you think.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during the Alabama Republican Party’s 2023 Summer meeting at the Renaissance Montgomery Hotel on Aug. 4, 2023, in Montgomery, Ala. Trump’s appearance in Alabama comes one day after he was arraigned on federal charges in Washington, D.C. for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Credit: Julie Bennett/Getty
Joseph Carl Roberts, a man once hailed by Donald Trump’s presidential administration as a victim of #MeToo hysteria, has reportedly been arrested for allegedly murdering and dismembering his girlfriend.
Roberts is accused of killing Rachel Elizabeth Imani Buckner, his girlfriend who was reportedly found in a large garbage bag wrapped in duct tape. He allegedly sought to hide his victims’ identities by removing body parts.
I had five different stories about the defacto slavery that is thriving in the U.S. in its prisons. But I have chosen this UN report because it makes it clear that not only do some Americans understand that this country is still embroiled in racist slavery — the prisoners involved are overwhelming Black — but that this is the way we appear to the rest of the world. A couple of years ago I wrote a research paper on the racism and brutality of all too many American law enforcement officers. (see SR Archive search on “brutality”. It is one of my most cited papers in half a century of writing papers. Slavery and the racism it represents has been baked into the United States since its creation, although you rarely hear anyone mention that. Did you know that 41 of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence owned human beings, as they owned cattle or dogs? And that 25 of the 55 men who participated in the Constitution Convention in 1787 and signed it were or had owned other human beings. In American prisons it is essentially still going on, as this article describes.
An El Paso County Jail inmate—who was paid $2 per hour—loads bodies into a refrigerated temporary morgue trailer outside the El Paso County Medical Examiner’s office in Texas during the Covid-19 pandemic on November 17, 2020. Credit: Mario Tama / Getty
A report published Thursday by United Nations human rights experts condemns systemic racism in the U.S. criminal justice system and policing, while describing “appalling” prison conditions and decrying forced unpaid convict labor as a “contemporary form of slavery.”
The U.N. International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in the Context of Law Enforcement report follows a visit to the U.S. earlier this year by a team of human rights experts. The U.N. officials collected testimonies from 133 affected people, visited five prisons and jails, and held meetings with advocacy groups and numerous government and police officials in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, and Washington, D.C.
“In all the cities we went to, we heard dozens of heartbreaking testimonies on how victims do not get justice or redress. This is […]
