The Good Gnus group is a community of readers, writers, activists, supporters, community builders, and patriots. We begin gathering every day at 7 a.m. ET to celebrate national good news. Our most active members are of course a subgroup of members of Daily Kos, whose Front Pages celebrate “News, Community, Action.” However, you don’t have to be a member of Daily Kos to be a Gnusie.
We are realists, not fools, idiots, or ostriches. We seek the truth. We know we live in a world where active, nefarious, and evil decision-makers do very bad things, and create stress and anxiety in us, our loved ones, our friends, our neighbors, and our allies, and destroy people and systems we hold dear. However, we choose to focus on the good news that people create around the country.
Sometimes we ourselves create Good News. Together we are strong and resilient. We return regularly to these pages to revitalize.
In a Good News Roundup, the weight of bearing good news is not borne by the author alone: Gnusies can be counted on to adorn the comment section with good news. Often commenters create three times as many comments as Recommendations! If you cannot linger with us for hours, I recommend you return in the mid or late afternoon, learn who your favorite commenters are, and Find their names on return visits. We count on certain favorite Gnusies to bless us in the comments with humor, hope, history, and analysis every day.
We bring good news, and we create good news.
Poll #1: Who Won the Week?
Cheers and Jeers archive and future editions here. Way, way more than 2 thanks to The One, our Wicked Wizard of Wit and writer of Who Won the Week, Willhelm von kosland!
- Uvalde, Texas native Matthew McConaughey, for briefly re-focusing national attention on gun massacres by helming the White House press lectern to call for common-sense firearm laws
The thousands of voters temporarily "leaving" the Democratic Party in Western Colorado so they can help vote out MAGA cultist Lauren Boebert in the primary
- New York's government, for passing gun-control laws that ban body armor sales, up the minimum age to buy an assault-style rifle, microstamp bullets, strengthen red-flag laws, and more
- The Florida state auditor general's office, for confirming that Generalissimo Ron DeSantis's health dept. goons delayed and misreported Covid-19 numbers to the detriment of residents and visitors
- The Jan. 6 commission, for opening its public hearings with eye-popping revelations that grabbed a significant chunk of the nation's attention
- South Dakota voters, for voting down a last-ditch GOP attempt to prevent them from passing Medicaid expansion in November via a ballot initiative
- The U.S. House, for passing the "Protecting Our Kids Act" including restrictions on large-capacity ammunition magazines and raising the minimum age to buy assault-style weapons
- The PGA, for revoking the memberships of players (including that soulless weirdo Phil Mickelson) who joined the new Bone Saw Killer Tour in Saudi Arabia for money
- Russian mountain climber Katya Lipka, for protesting Putin's invasion of Ukraine by flying the Ukrainian flag from the summit of Mount Everest
Bill’s Friday poll is here.
Which item did you vote for? Why?
Who made a winning move after Bill's deadline on Friday?
[With more than 300 Recommendations, GoodNewsRoundup’s diary is still on the Trending List. ~ 2thanks]
The hearings are not about convincing Tucker Carlson viewers. The hearings are about presenting the truth in a clear and compelling manner, because it is the right things to do — it is perhaps the most important thing in the world. By all accounts, the former guy tried to overthrow a democratically elected government. He attempted a violent coup. The committee doesn’t need to convince Fox News heads about that. They need to present the story so it is out there for all of us. It is the right, decent, moral, and necessary thing to do.
The hearings are good news. It is awful news that this happened, but it is great news that these hearings are happening. it isn’t great news because it will change the minds of the Fox Heads. It is great news because here we are with a functional democracy that is holding people accountable and telling the truth. That outcome was not certain.
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first, a ton of people watched it. This is just on the traditional TV networks. Doesn’t include online or those of us who watched it on PBS
Oliver Milman, The Guardian: Environmental groups have welcomed Joe Biden’s invoking of national security powers to rapidly expand the production of clean energy technology as a significant advance in the effort to curb dangerous climate breakdown.
Biden has triggered the Defense Production Act, a cold war-era law used to compel businesses to ramp up production of certain materials to aid national security, to boost the output of solar panels, building insulation, transformers for power grids and heat pumps, which are used to efficiently heat and cool homes.
The US president has also provided a two-year exemption to solar panel companies from tariffs on imported parts, easing the flow of technology from China and other countries for use in the US, a country where only 2.8% of electricity comes from solar power.
So the Cafe is open, with Rounded Up Good News on every table and both hot and cold Sunday morning beverages (coffee, tea, mimosas….) being served up. Thank you for the tastes and links and opening up the front door, 2thanks!
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June 12ths of the historic first dozen days of June, all nestled in a row of 6 Good beside a second row of 6 Goofy in that long, white carton in your fridge, all suitable for cracking open and whisking up into a hot fry pan, sprinkled with bits of cheese and bacon, and served up in a Sunday omelet of Good News for your day.
This week in Gnuville
People are missing the point of the 1/6 hearings: Saturday's GNR
GoodNewsRoundup
Good News Roundup for Friday, June 10, 2022: Work to Win, Not to Surrender
chloris creator
Thursday Good News: Surprise, Surprise!
Mokurai
Nifty's Back, Baby!! ?? - Wednesday, June 8 Good News Roundup
niftywriter
Good News Roundup for Tuesday, June 7, 2022
arhpdx
From the GNR Newsroom: Its the Monday Good News Roundup
Jessiestaf, Bhu, and Killer300
Sunday Good News ¤ WineRev ¤ 2 Polls: WWtW? AND Observing the Jan 6th committee hearings on Jun 9th?
2thanks
14 Other Sources of Good News
🎩 arhpdx and Mokurai: In case you need more good news for soul nourishment, arhpdx posted a list of good news sites toward the top of their recent Roundup, or you can find that list in my comment: Good News Sources. Thanks, A & M!
[On a desktop, you could open that comment in a new Tab by clicking the timestamp, and then you could Bookmark that page or save it to your Favorites.]
Science
This is the third story reported recently in Good News Roundups about bacterial enzymes and recycling plastics. The first involved bacteria found around hot deep-sea vents, and the second involved bacteria found in a compost heap in a German cemetery.
Fionna Samuels, Scientific American: Rinke and his colleagues have been feeding plastic to Zophobas morio beetle larvae—dubbed “superworms” for their large size—to see if the microbes and enzymes in their gut might offer insights into how to break down some of the staggering amount of plastic waste humans generate. The researchers have found that these superworms can survive on a diet of nothing but polystyrene, which is used in a vast array of products, ranging from cups to packing peanuts. The worms’ ability to process the plastic suggests it is very efficiently broken down in the creatures’ digestive tract. “They are basically like eating machines,” says Rinke, who works at the University of Queensland in Australia and co-authored a new study describing his team’s findings, published on Thursday in Microbial Genomics.
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Rinke and his colleagues are not suggesting that superworms should be released into landfills or polluted landscapes to munch through mountains of plastic—but rather that the worms’ unique gut microbiome may hold a key to developing a chemical process to biodegrade the material. The researchers have their work cut out for them. They plan to use their new study’s metagenomic data as the foundation to experimentally verify what each identified bacterial enzyme does to plastic and how all the enzymes fit together to hopefully find the most efficient way to break down our plastic waste.
Image: Larva of two-tailed tiger swallowtail (Papilio multicaudata). Not the larvae referenced in the Scientific American article.
Our map of Gnuville: 751 of us have shared our global locations!
To leave your mark, please Reply in the comments to tljdk or the map-building comment. Please include your city and state only, NOT street number and street. (Please persist, we are volunteers.)
Image: Two maps of the United States, one above the other. The maps indicate the approximate locations of members of the Good News Roundup community in 2019 and 2021. The lower map contains many more blue pin-markers than the upper map. Upper image: A map of Gnuville from February 15, 2019 with about 50 Gnusie pins. Lower image: A map of Gnuville from March 21, 2021 with 582 pins across our orb.
If you join us regularly, are you Following us? More than 400 Kosacks Follow us.
Tech Talk for Kosacks
- Load-More Workaround (Revisions of 3/15/2022 in bold): On a desktop or laptop, to banish the Daily Kos Load More buttons, click this link, which opens the main Daily Kos page and shuts off the Load More buttons at the same time. You must Reload any open Daily Kos pages. After that, you’re good to go, but you may need to come back here and click that link again in a few weeks. The DK Help Desk asked me to add this: The “Load More” option also resets the user back to the display of the old-style, React comments.
- Got a Daily Kos tech question? Let us know. No question is too basic, even “What’s a Kosack?” or “What’s a Gnusie?”
- Solved a tech question recently? Please feel free to repeat it in the comments.
Where Ever is Herd
Morning Good News Roundups at 7 x 7: These Gnusies lead the herd at 7 a.m. ET, 7 days a week:
- The Monday GNR Newsroom (Jessiestaf, Killer300, and Bhu). With their five, we survive and thrive.
- Alternating Tuesdays: NotNowNotEver and arhpdx.
- Wednesdays: niftywriter.
- Thursdays: Mokurai the 1st, 2nd, and 5th (when there is one), WineRev the 3rd, MCUBernieFan the 4th.
- Fridays: chloris creator. Regular links to the White House Briefing Room.
- Saturdays: GoodNewsRoundup, the one and only!
- Sundays: 2thanks. A brief roundup of Roundups, a retrospective, a smorgasbord, a bulletin board, an oasis, a watering hole, a thunder of hooves, a wellness, a place for beginners to learn the rules of the veldt. For instance, we do not welcome grammar-police comments in Roundups.
Sun-High Good News Roundup: It’s a long dry trek between 7 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. ET. About half way between is noon or 1 o'clock. If you'd like to create a midday oasis post a Good News Group diary regularly at about that time, please let me know via kosmail. The team will support you. If morning is a better time for you, Mokurai says he can trade times.
hpg posts Evening Shade diaries at 7:30 p.m. ET every day! After a long day, Gnusies meet in the evening shade and continue sharing Good News, good community, and good actions. Find Evening Shades here or on the Trending List.
oldhippiedude posts Tweets of the Week on Sundays at 6 p.m. CT. Our second evening Gnusie hangout zone! In search of a TOTW diary? Look here or here or on the Trending List.
For more information about the Good News group, please see our detailed Welcoming comment, one of the first comments in our morning diaries.
The 6 R’s of the Resistance
Joe Biden is now our President. However, we continue to stay vocal and active, we continue to pull Joe to the left, and we continue resist the GQP.
- Refresh and Rest: Take care of you, the hero: Eat well, exercise, and rest.
- Resist: Protest on the streets, call senators and representatives, etc.
- Rebel: Run for office, GOTV (Get Out The Vote), support a progressive.
- Revolt: Change the laws, change the culture, build your communities.
- Rely: Trust that millions of others are fighting the good fight.
- Rejoice: Joy promotes resilience and gives rise to hope.
How to Resist: Do Something …
Uplifting chloris creator from Friday, June 3rd:
DONATE TO SAVE DEMOCRACY! GNR SAVES DEMOCRACY! GoodNewsRoundup started our ActBlue campaign.
new!!! Tax-exempt organization complaint referrals. 13909. This has been filled out for the NRA, but, hey, you can use it for a lot of other organizations. How about if some of us white folk go into some of the MAGA churches and video record what they’re saying?
“The process to get the NRA's tax-exempt nonprofit status revoked has become simpler. All you need to do is save this form and email it to eoclass@irs.gov. It's all filled out for you. You just need to click send.” Allen Glines
Note that the IRS protects your anonymity: The appropriate checkbox is already checked: "I am concerned that I might face retaliation or retribution if my identity is disclosed."
Voting rights. This may be the biggest issue threatening our democracy right now. Besides contacting your representatives at the state and federal level to do the right thing (depending on who they are), you can support and contact these organizations:
ACLU — American Civil Liberties Union
Democracy Docket — founded by Marc Elias, so important in fighting the challenges after the last election.
Fair Fight — founded by Stacey Abrams
🌱Grass roots. Biden and Harris can do the top-down stuff, but we have to support from the bottom. I don’t know how to deprogram 75 million people, but some things have been written about, such as deep canvassing, and lots of people are talking about this. If you know someone (who did not storm the Capitol), then see if you can be pleasant. Instead of trying to reason with them (logic is obviously not their strong point) distract them with something else. We need to remove the sources of lies and to take down the temperature. If we get more of the Rs to wear masks and to get vaccinated and to vote for Ds, the country will be a better place. We need to coax some of them out of the rabbit holes and diffuse the anger and the crazy.
🏃 Run for something. If you want to run for something, but have no idea what to do, these people will help you. They also like money and volunteers to help those people who are running, so even if you’re not in a position to stand for office, you can help. Note: they are especially planning to target the 57 Rs in local governments who participated in the insurrection.
👎 Defund the seditionists. This is a list with companies that sometimes have donated to the seditionists, and their current approach to supporting or not supporting the seditionists. The list is long. You will recognize many of the corporations, and you probably have a relationship with some — either you are a customer, a shareholder, or maybe even an employee. Contact them and compliment or complain, but let them know you are watching. Forward it to others.
Most important, we don’t give away our hope. The kleptocrats want you to lose your courage and determination. This is a giant and important fight for all of us but, win or lose, we keep fighting and voting and organizing and spreading truth and light. We never give up.
On Daily Kos:
We welcome comments in Roundups every day regarding:
- National or local Good News.
- Links, stories, music, videos, quotes, tweets. (No tweets or images of the saffron chlamidiot, please.)
- Your resistance activity.
In my Sunday smorgasbord Roundups, I especially welcome the following types of comments:
- Who won YOUR week?
- Questions about Daily Kos tech issues or our map.
- Good News Roundups and you.
- How are you resisting?
- Please let’s stick to Good News today, no mews or databases.
In the comments of all Roundups, we do not welcome Grammar Police or Debbie Downers.
Top Image: Starhawk created this diary’s top image of the rampant gnu and gave it to the members of the Good News Roundup group (Gnusies)! Thank you, Starhawk! This is a quite detailed sketch of a gnu drawn in brown, green, and black. A happy and dynamic gnu dances on its left hind leg in a classic rampant heraldric pose. Joyful letters prance above and behind the mane: “Happy Dance.” Signature: Nick Korolev, 2021.
Our Roundup is almost open!
Thank you for fighting for truth and justice with all us Gnusies! 40% of our Readers don’t visit every day, 50% of us do, and 10% are here for the first time! We all do what we can. For 4 years, we’ve shared positive news, laughed, organized, resisted, rebelled, revolted without being revolting, relied, rested, mentored, created, crossed rivers, chewed our cud, puffed methane out both ends, and laughed. Here’s looking at you, kid, and standing upwind!
As always, please share more Good News than I can find or provide.
This is a group diary, and by my power I declare this Good Gnus Salo(o)n open! Let the good-news sharing and community building begin!
Power with, not power over ❤️ ✊ ❤️
2thanks (he, him)
(A Gnusie last week asked me to repeat this poll.)