Hey everyone, its December 27th, two days after Christmas, the boss is on vacation and we here at the GNR newsroom HAVE GONE CRAZY! Crazy with good news that is. Yep, as the year winds down to an end, and we all hope that maybe this time the next year wont try and outdo the last one in the “What even the Hell” department. Its a time when people need that good news more than ever, and so the GNR newsroom (myself, Bhu, and Killer300) will be happy to oblige, so lets get right into it.
This scene was recently repeated several times across Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city. Part of a project to draw attention to the dangerous condition of local streets, the tactic was instigated by a loose confederation of citizens called the Better Bulawayo Initiative.
Formed in November 2018, the group of 200-300 citizens is using creative, low-risk protest measures to agitate for better city services. Their goal is to address the kinds of simple but important issues that affect the lives of residents every day, like access to clean water, better sanitation services, regular garbage collection and safer roads.
Resistance is everywhere, and it comes in all kinds of forms, we have to remember that, celebrate that, and support it.
If you are the type of person that reflects on all of the things you are thankful for on Thanksgiving, here are some nuclear energy “wins” from the last year that you can add to your list. Above all else, we are thankful for all of the support and activism efforts from those who believe in our cause that the world needs nuclear energy. We could not have had the success we have seen this year without you.
Nuclear power is important because its better for the environment than fossil fuels, so keeping it around short term is a good idea.
By the time Christmas Eve rolled around last year, Brits were well tired of Brexit. The trade talks were in their 11th hour, the details were mind-numbing and the big picture had been talked to death over four years. The pandemic made the tortuous divorce between the U.K. and European Union seem frivolous. A deal clinched, Boris Johnson declared victory and heaped praise on his hard-nosed chief negotiator, David Frost.
Now it seems to be Johnson himself whom people are tired of. Brexit is no longer an electoral cash machine for the prime minister, as the shock defeat in Brexit-voting North Shropshire, a seat the Tories held for some 200 years, proved. There has been a tsunami of criticism over the prime minister’s policy judgment and integrity. And in a major blow, Frost has now resigned.
So Brexit doesn’t seem to be doing well. Good, chase all these cretins out of office, every last one of them, including this second rate Trump wannabe.
“Restorative justice is a paradigm shift in the way that we see the world,” says Dr. Teiahsha Bankhead. Bankhead is the director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, RJOY, the youth nonprofit that first partnered with Oakland Unified to launch RJ in schools. Its programming goes beyond school-based programs, now, and exists citywide.
Bankhead’s goal is to make Oakland more like Hull, England, the world’s first modern RJ city, where schools, police departments, and youth services all use RJ. Police there, for example, use it to resolve neighborhood conflicts, like in one case in which an elderly woman in public housing had “complained to police hundreds of times about young people’s noise and profanity. A police-led conference with local youth and the woman stopped [it].”
All around the world, new ways of dealing with problems are emerging, and are helping to heal people and build a brighter future.
As liberals take stock of 2021, they may be tempted to declare the year a failure.
The pandemic seems no closer to ending than it did 18 months ago, with nearly 30 percent of Americans still unvaccinated and the Omicron variant sure to spark a surge of infections. President Joe Biden’s signature social spending package, Build Back Better, appears doomed after West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat, said on Sunday that he would not support the package. Other progressive priorities have stalled, such as immigration reform and voting rights. Worse yet, congressional Democrats look poised to lose their majority in 2022 as retirements mount, Biden’s approval ratings stay mired in the doldrums, and an emboldened Donald Trump plots a 2024 comeback.
But there’s still plenty of progress to trumpet, even if Democrats’ achievements this year fell short of progressives’ aspirations. Democrats should boast about this economy and other triumphs accomplished despite Republican intransigence:
Yeah we didn’t get everything we wanted done, but we did get a lot done, and we’re gonna get a lot more done in the future.
On two separate occasions this past week, Trump advocated for people to take the COVID-19 vaccine. On Sunday, crowds booed the former president when he told Bill O'Reilly that he'd taken a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot and was pro-vaccination. Trump doubled down on his stance during an interview with the conservative commentator Candace Owens on Wednesday, hailing the vaccine as "one of the greatest achievements of mankind."
"No, the vaccine worked. But some people aren't taking it. The ones that get very sick and go to the hospital are the ones that don't take their vaccine," Trump told Owens.
"If you take the vaccine, you're protected. Look, the results of the vaccine are very good. And if you do get it, it's a very minor form. People aren't dying when they take their vaccine," he added.
On social media, right-wing figures, such as the conspiracy theorist and InfoWars talk-show host Alex Jones and the recently subpoenaed "Stop the Steal" organizer Ali Alexander, came out in force to rebuke Trump over his position.
So, things aren’t going well for Trump it seems.
Lets get things straight here: Trump is not special, he’s never been special. The only thing he did will was read the script that the GOP have trained their base to respond to. And the second he steps off that script they turn on him, as is happening now. The cult like devotion that Trumps base has is towards the ideology he represents, not to him.
And even an idiot like Trump realizes that the anti vaxx movement is a stone around the neck of the GOP, a stone they had unfortunately tied too tightly. At this point the GOP can’t convince their voters to get vaccinated, and even Trump gets pilloried if he tries.
On that note, we bid adieu to the Good Ness Roundup for this week, and we bid adieu to 2021, lets see what the next year holds, hopefully more good news for all of us.