The destruction of the bees is now beginning to affect agriculture, as this report makes clear. This story is going to keep growing. I just hope it isn't too late. Because if it is humanity has a real problem.
While gains have certainly been made toward a more inclusive, egalitarian society over the half-century since Martin Luther King delivered his iconic I Have a Dream Speech (as part of the March for Jobs and Justice in Washington, D.C.), in many respects – particularly in economic matters – there has been little or no progress at all.
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Indeed, by certain measures equality has significantly diminished in the US. Accompanying a minimum wage that, when adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was in 1968, and wages that – except for the wealthy – haven’t risen in decades, the economy has polarized wealth to a greater degree than ever, reducing the economic classes more and more to two – rich and poor – and squeezing the middle and working classes into little more than a memory in the process. In among other places, this lack of change is observable in the fact that it’s five decades later and people are still talking about jobs – coveting jobs as though jobs were those necessities and luxuries that work is obtained to secure.
China is now the largest trading nation on Earth, and is on track to be the dominant economy, a trend that holds profound implications for the U.S. Here is a report. Clearly the vampire capitalism that has come to dominate the U.S. is not performing for anyone but the 1%.
Another consequence of climate change. Increased illness due to mosquitoes and ticks will be occurring world wide. We really aren't thinking this through, and our failure to deal rationally with what is happening is going to make us sicker, on top of everything else.
But the most problematic aspect of the open office may be physical rather than psychological: simple noise. In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance.
It is an article of faith by the Theocratic Right that poor people generally abuse social programs. They are drug abusers, who just want to lay around and who squander the government's largesse on booze, and $600 purses. The fascinating thing is that every time they get a chance to prove this the opposite is proved. The urine test that showed significantly lower drug usage — 2.6% — than the national average 4.7%.! Oops. Now a particularly grotesque version by the tea bagger governor, Maine's Paul LePage who in trying to prove welfare fraud is rampant has produced a study showing it is a tenth of one percent. The truth is, as study after study and nation after nation show a decent safety net is an essential component of a healthy democracy.
Beneath the political polemics a tectonic movement in the electorate is occurring, as this survey shows. Moderate Republicans are abandoning the party and calling themselves Independents. The Theocratic Right is capturing the Republican Party. Click through to see the very helpful charts.
This story is absolutely appalling. It is bad on so many levels. Many of these arrests are for marijuana possession. There is an arrest for this every 48 seconds in America, grossly disproportionately Black young men. One of the consequences of ending Marijuana Prohibition is that this will end. It will be bitterly opposed, however. Private prisons corporations, prison guard associations and unions, court systems whose budget is tied to criminal trials, prison clothing providers, small towns near prisons where the prison is the big employer, and anybody else who lives on the incarceration and warehousing of human beings en mass will resist the end of racist prohibition.
It is amazing to me that everyone did not see this banking issue coming. It was perfectly obvious. Banks are not going to deal with Marijuana dispensaries until it is Federally legal, or they are required to do so. The issue should have been anticipated and dealt with. Hopefully Washington State will see this, and make adjustments.
Few people seem to realize that six of nine Justices on the Supreme Court are Roman Catholics. As this essay explains this has had a significant impact on the Court's decisions concerning women.
Here is the latest in the GMO struggle. Although Big Food thwarted the labelling movement in both California and Washington by spending tens of millions of dollars — some sources say in Washington as much as a million dollars a day — it passed in Connecticut and Maine. Buyers, ordinary people, are increasingly concerned about knowing what is in their food. So now Big Food is going to try another tack, as this report describes.
