Ever since LBJ wrecked his Great Society vision by doubling down and down on Vietnam, the greedy and the haters have been able to dam up all of the good will in the US behind the Southern Strategy and Voodoo Economics and a whole lot more. Time’s up. We’re the majority now, and our lead grows every year. So we have begun to see all of the dams leaking for several years now, and we can start to see how they will all come crashing down in a flood of justice rolling down like mighty waters.
Kind of like this, which wiped out much of Nazi Germany’s heavy industry in the Ruhr Valley for many months.
Operation Chastise
The Dam Busters (1955) "Hello Z-Zebra, Are You Alright? ... " HD 1080p
When we all get together and vote next year, we won’t have to take it any more. On every issue that the Doom & Gloomers recite and the other side screams and carries on about, we have the numbers, starting with a new flood of good will that is leaking through, and will break down, all of those dams, issue by issue, state by state.
President Joe the Coolest of His Name is one of our greatest assets, but unlike our adversaries we do not live by the Great Man fallacy. There are hundreds, nay, thousands more. You can name many of them. Kamala, Bernie, Liz, AOC, Hakeem…Rachel, Jen, Chris, Alex…And on the other side, a bunch of losers who couldn’t campaign their way out of a paper bag without vicious voter suppression and gerrymanders.
Regular Good News
I’m not diving into all of the court cases today, but rather going back to our roots with our inspiring collection of Good News sources.
- Civil Eats (good news about food systems, with a lot of warnings)
Momentum Builds to Regulate Water Pollution from CAFOs
In this week’s Field Report: changes underfoot to regulate CAFO pollution, animal welfare label claims, and more funding for climate farming.
Good News on Poverty in Indonesia, Press Freedom in Fiji and Rhinos in Zimbabwe
Plus, progress on AIDS in Uganda, healthcare and gender equality in the United States, some big breakthroughs on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, the biggest ever debt-for-nature swap in Ecuador, and some welcome shade for US cities.
- Good For All News (Jane Goodall’s site, with hopeful news about conservation and activism)
Preventing Pandemics with Data from the Forests of Gombe
Researchers at the Gombe National Park, Tanzania have been trying to understand zoonotic diseases better by dissecting these questions for decades. To understand the relationship between the pathogens of humans and non-human animals, the Jane Goodall Institute has been a partner in the Gombe Ecosystem Health Project for over 16 years. Since its inception, researchers have been able to gain more knowledge about zoonotic diseases and how they affect humans and wildlife. In addition, the partnership has recently launched the Gombe One Health Hub, which is working to identify preemptive measures to ensure the safety of chimpanzees and other wildlife, humans, and all species. Together we can plan for and prevent the next pandemic. But how? A paper, The Gombe Ecosystem Health Project: 16 years of program evolution and lessons learned (Lonsdorf et al, 2021) outlines the story of this work and where it’s going next.
Milestone Achieved: 10,000 Women Certified To Fight Malaria in Rwanda
Certified Care provides official certification and livable wages to this unofficial community of health workers in the area, allowing them to do the work they’ve spent their lives doing (this time, building a career in the process), all while contributing to the efforts to eradicate malaria.
“They know what they’re doing,” Manasseh Gihana Wandera, Executive Director of Society for Family Health Rwanda, said in a video. “They just need the paper certification.”
For New Rover, NASA is Swapping Buggy Shape for a Giant Snake in Hopes it Can Explore Icy Moon of Saturn
The 13-foot-long (4 meter) machine is called EELS, or the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor, owing to theories that the icy-covered world of Enceladus may have a subsurface ocean of liquid water—one of the solar system’s best places to look for signs of extraterrestrial life.
Conservation project brings platypus back to Australia’s oldest national park
In a historic conservation project, the platypus, a one-of-a-kind mammal found only in Australia, has been successfully reintroduced to the country’s oldest national park located just south of Sydney. Four female platypuses were released into the Royal National Park, which was founded in 1879 and is the world’s second-oldest national park. The University of New South Wales, Taronga Conservation Society Australia, WWF-Australia, and the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service collaborated on this translocation.
What Could Go Right? The gender gap switch
“A sharp way to put this in data terms,” Reeves tells us in our latest What Could Go Right? podcast episode, “is that there is a bigger gender gap in United States higher education today than there was when Title IX was passed to promote women and girls 50 years ago. But it’s the other way around.” Women now earn more than half of bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, and PhDs. Seventy percent of high school valedictorians are girls, and girls are also more likely to graduate high school at all.
There has been an explosion in the number of American dads taking parental leave.
A Simple Fix Lifts Single Moms Out of Poverty in India’s Slums
Fund A Mom’s direct cash payments are helping mothers in Jaipur feed their kids and change their lives.
Hey! It’s just like UBI!
Quantum Experiment Shows How Einstein Was Wrong About One Thing [link fixed]
Loophole-free Bell inequality violation with superconducting circuits [link fixed]
Over 30 meters, a record distance for measurements on entangled particle pairs.
Jason Arday - what a beautiful story.
Diagnosed with autism and global development delay in his early years, Jason Arday was unable to speak until he was 11 years old and could not read or write until he was 18.
Aged 37, he has now become the youngest black person ever appointed to a professorship at the University of Cambridge.
People are sharing the adult problems that 'nobody prepared you for' and they're so true
How movements can keep politicians from selling out
By understanding how mainstream political culture co-opts elected officials, grassroots groups can help them resist.
This is where movements come in. Having a base of grassroots institutions to back movement candidates gives them a grounding they can use to sidestep Washington norms, wage insurgent campaigns and govern in a manner that shows accountability to their core constituencies rather than to wealthy elites. Instead of relying solely on personal values to remain principled, they make this challenge into a collective task. With regard to the five filters, movements provide tools for resistance, offering infrastructure, resources and conscious strategy for counteracting each of them in turn.
A basic tenet of social psychology is that if someone is surrounded by others who accept the same set of norms and rules of behavior, that person will find it very difficult to avoid internalizing this dominant set of values. “Honestly, it is a shit show. It’s scandalizing, every single day,” Ocasio-Cortez has reported of her experience in Washington. “What is surprising to me is how it never stops being scandalizing. Some folks perhaps get used to it, or desensitized to the many different things that may be broken,” she says. And yet she emphasizes the need to guard against such desensitization and resist deferring to the supposed “adults in the room” who have made their peace with the system. “Sometimes to be in a room with some of the most powerful people in the country and see the ways that they make decisions — sometimes they’re just susceptible to groupthink, susceptible to self-delusion,” she notes.
- Warp News (a mixed bag from Sweden — too many paywalled stories, but some good free ones)
Electric cars catch fire less often than fossil fuel cars
The fires in electric cars have been steady in the last three years, although the number of electric cars has almost doubled.
- Yes! (a magazine that emails a newsletter focusing on one or two good news stories)
California Runs the Numbers on Reparations
A task force calculated how much Black residents should receive for systemic, state-sanctioned discrimination and ongoing harm.
Repellent Rogue Republicans Rushing to Ridiculous Ruin
Really.
The Party has developed a culture of losing.
Ron DeSantis
The Democrats are killing the Republicans...We’re behind the 8-ball!
You can’t pick a candidate who doesn’t make exceptions for rape, incest, the life of the mother, in a place like Pennsylvania.
Sean Hannity
I can chew and walk gum at the same time.
Indicted George, um, wossisname, (R-Berzerkistan)
Massive Dam Failures Caught On Camera (with reasons)
The #1 cause of the disasters: Dam managers didn’t believe the dam engineers and geologists. There are worries about this happening at the Three Gorges Dam in China, holding back 3 trillion cubic meters of water. Major cities on the Yangzi River could be wiped out.
(My family took a tour in China that included a trip down the Yangzi from Sichuan to the coast, so we went by the dam under construction, and saw much that is now under water and is intended never to be seen again.)
The Id doubled down on CNN the very next day. CNN is facing furious backlash for airing his campaign event in the feeble guise of a Town Hall.
Carroll and her attorney are weighing another defamation lawsuit.
Ma’am, it should say. Someone can GIMP or Photoshop that for us.
Have you noticed that Republicans are simultaneously scared to death of our new majority, and in complete denial that it means anything for them? So when the big tipping point topples, they will be massively unprepared for the consequences.
Zombies and Vouduns and Trolls, Oh My
👇👇😂😂👇👇
Former Giuliani employee alleges sexual assault and harassment in $10 million lawsuit
Oh, Lordy, he “taped” himself. For a book he wanted to write. His victim, Noelle Dunphy, and her lawyer, have the, let’s just say, lurid recordings, and tens of thousands of e-mails and other records. Various legal authorities have inquired about access.
I appreciate the work of the Never Trumpers, but I observe that they have not, in general, come over to reality on any other point. Most still believe in fantasy economics. Many still pretend that privatizing Social Security would be good for workers. They still want to Starve the Beast, pretending that they want smaller government while they try to slash social programs and expand all of their oppressions. They still lament human rights.
Science! Animals! Weirdness!
Easy enough to find out. We could even do a simple double-blind study.
What Really Happened at the Oroville Dam Spillway?
Funny or Cry
Support your local cartoonists.
And the striking writers.
Mark Fiore—Brain Control
The Day The Dam Broke, Part 1 - Thurber Reading - 2010-09-17 Countdown with Keith Olbermann
The Day The Dam Broke, Part 2 Thurber Reading - 2010-09-24 Countdown with Keith Olbermann
I miss Keith on MSNBC, but he still does Countdown podcasts.
Sorry, no music today, except in the background.
