Good Wednesday Morning! Grab your favorite beverage and join in the Good News Round Up.
Note: I will not be commenting on the NH primaries or staying up for results but you know you can discuss in the comments!
Well, we have been in the year of 2024 for a few weeks now and it sure looks like it will be an, uh hum, an eventful time. It can be tough to read the daily deluge of the latest shenanigans of our opposing party and fellow American’s and this does not look like it will become any less stressful.
I ran across this on the interwebs and thought, well yes that sums it up.
I can’t remember a time more comprehensively incomprehensible than this. And as the Bachman Turner Overdrive famously said in 1974 — ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.’ John Caswell, Meduim
Many of us here have spoken of hope, optimism, self-care and other ways to stay the course without, ya know, losing your mind. But I thought I would also talk about resilience. Resilience is the ability to withstand adversity and bounce back from difficult life events. Being resilient does not mean a person doesn't experience stress, emotional upheaval, and suffering. Resilience involves the ability to work through emotional pain and suffering.
I landed on this website when thinking about resilience in our year of 2024 and thought I would share some tidbits with you all.
“Reading through website after website summarizing how to be happier or stronger in 2024, the answers are easy to dismiss. They’re so similar and simple. There’s no new brilliance to staying physically and mentally resilient. But here’s the problem: Staying true to what we already know takes work. We get distracted by our fear and stress or tantalizing quick fixes, like another show, game, or purchase. Even in the midst of ongoing crises, our minds need rest, but vicious, vacuous politics and news curated to inflame immerse us in all that’s wrong 24-7. Good things and bad things endlessly cycle. Resilience relies on staying aware of our choices to influence what we can and then navigating all the rest as well as we’re able”.
Some tips they provide include connecting with people who support you, engage in what sustains you, exercise, take care of you brain, and practice kindness and gratitude. I think to be resilient we also should try to be hopeful, optimistic, take care of ourselves and the best prescription, read the Good News Round Up.
Okay then here is your uninterrupted dose of good news for the day.
Cal State Professors Win 'Historic' Deal Hours After Largest University Strike in US History
"In case anyone forgot, strikes work!" said the professors' union.
After negotiations that had stretched on since last May, nearly 30,000 lecturers and professors in the California State University system were prepared this week to go on strike for five days—but the work stoppage only took a matter of hours to convince the institution to reach a tentative deal with the educators.
The agreement, which members of the California Faculty Association (CFA) are expected to vote on in the coming weeks, includes an immediate 5% pay raise for all CSU faculty that will be applied retroactively to July 1, 2023. Another 5% raise will go into effect this coming July.
White House Issues Unprecedented Pardons After FDA Finds Cannabis to Be More Like Tylenol Than Heroin
On Friday, January 20th, the federal government waved the white flag in the war on drugs as it regards the cannabis plant.
President Biden issued presidential pardons to any American or lawful permanent resident who has a conviction of cannabis possession on their record.
At the same time, he ordered the Dept. of Health and Human Services to compile a case for the reclassifying of cannabis from a Schedule 1 drug, such as heroin and cocaine, to a Schedule 3 drug, like testosterone and fortified Tylenol.
The United States FDA Controlled Substance Staff writes in the HHS report that their agency is recommending the rescheduling of cannabis as it meets all three criteria for doing so, namely a lower potential for abuse compared to Schedule 2 substances, an existing and established medical use, and a lower psycho-physical dependency potential.
Black Teenage Teacher Makes History
While most teenagers spend their free time on video games and social media, 16-year-old Shania Muhammad is using her three college degrees to help mold young minds as a third grade teacher.
Muhammad started taking college classes at age 13 and earned associate’s degrees from Langston University and Oklahoma City Community College – at the same time. But her higher level learning didn’t stop there. In May 2023, she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Langston University with a 4.0 GPA at the same time as her older brother and sister. Just 15 years old at the time, she is the youngest person to graduate from an HBCU.
Now, at 16, Muhammad continues to make history teaching third graders in Oklahoma City. The talented teen is the youngest full-time salaried teacher in the United States. And she knows she has a unique opportunity to inspire the young students in her class.
The Movement to ‘Make America Rake Again’
Ten years ago, when Michael Hall retired as dean of students at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and began to spend more time at home, he noticed an ear-splitting noise — something he’d never been around during the day to hear. “The neighbor’s contractor was rattling my windows and assaulting my ears!” he says. One day, he went out and met the contractor at the curb and said, “Can you dial back on the leaf blower? There’s only 10 feet between our houses and it’s really a nuisance.” The contractor responded, “If you kept better care of that side of your house, I wouldn’t have to do that.”
That launched Hall on a mission that he’s still leading to this day. “At first I started out as Don Quixote out there, tilting at windmills,” says Hall, who describes himself as an old Berkeley hippie. Today he’s not only a co-chair of Quiet Clean PDX, a grassroots organization that’s pushing to ban the use of gas-powered leaf blowers city-wide, but part of a growing national movement. More than 100 US cities have banned gas-powered leaf blowers and over 45 different organizations across the country are part of the Quiet Clean Alliance, from Quiet Clean Philly to Quiet Clean Seattle.
How Books Are Reaching Kids in ‘Book Deserts’
When Larry Abrams started teaching English in New Jersey high schools in the early 2000s, his first two schools were within a few miles of each other, yet worlds apart.
At the first school in a wealthy suburb, “I taught the sons and daughters of millionaires,” Abrams remembers. The second school was “at the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum,” and Abrams says he had to “relearn how to teach” his students there.
“My ninth graders had a fourth- or fifth-grade reading level,” he says, though they were native English speakers. He realized this was because they were missing something he had taken for granted: books.
Abrams began requesting donations of gently used children’s books from friends and students, and within weeks, thousands of books piled up, first in his garage, then in a storage room. He distributed them to young parents and elementary schools. The book donations were met with so much enthusiasm (“It caused a feeding frenzy,” Abrams says) that he is now the founding director of the nonprofit BookSmiles, one of the biggest book banks for children in the US.
‘I just count the laps’: Canadian swimmer, 99, breaks three world records
By the time an exhausted Betty Brussel finally swims to the finish and pulls herself from the pool, an Olympic athlete could have covered the same distance at least three times. But the 99-year-old Canadian’s quiet determination has led her to shatter world records and transformed her into an unlikely celebrity within the amateur swim community.
At a weekend swim meet in the British Columbia city of Saanich, Brussel broke the existing world record in the 400-metre freestyle, knocking nearly four minutes off the previous standard in the 100- to 104-year-old age class. She repeated her record-breaking performances in 50-metre backstroke and the 50-metre breaststroke that same day.
“When I’m racing, I don’t think about anything. Nothing. I just count the laps, so that I know how many I have left. I always try to find a pace that I can sustain – you’re asking a lot from your body in these races. And on the last lap, well, I give it everything I have.”
NASA launched the twin Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1977 on a grand tour of the solar system and into the mysteries of interstellar space. Attached to each of these spacecraft is a golden phonograph record containing a message for any extraterrestrial intelligence that might encounter it, perhaps billions of years from now. This enchanting artifact—the Voyager Golden Record—may be the last vestige of our civilization after we are gone forever. Almost 47 years later, the probes are more than 12 billion miles away and still transmitting valuable scientific data back home. Yes, there have been nerve-rattling hiccups but NASA's engineers have managed incredible feats of long-distance repairs. The crafts' nuclear power is running out though. Can the Voyagers manage to stay in touch with us for another few years until their 50th anniversary?
"We've done a lot of clever engineering things to be able to keep these instruments on as long as possible, knowing that we have a limited power supply," Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd says.
Any other news? Just joking around. I know there is a lot of other news out there, from the funny (Donald cannot complete a sentence) to the mundane. Me, I like to keep my Wednesday’s simple and free of as much stress as possible. So you know, share all that other news in the comments.
Before I sign off, keep in mind these words from Senator Bernie Sanders:
“In these difficult times it is easy to become victim to despair and cynicism. It is easy to become paralyzed into inaction when one realizes that there are no magic solutions to the complex political crises we face, and that every step forward has its drawbacks and critics.
But we truly have no alternative but to stand up and fight for the country we know we can become. This is a struggle not just for our generation, not just for our kids and grand children – but for the future of our democracy and our planet. This is not a time to surrender”.
Fight like hell!
Green Day firing it up for 2024 (and pissing off the MAGA crowd, which brings me much joy)
Peace. ✌️