Blessed are those who care for and protect life. Blessed are those who are kind in thoughts and actions. Blessed are those who experience deep empathy and connection with the sacredness of life. And bless those who are courageous and live with open eyes, minds, hearts, souls.
We are all related, all connected, all family. To the degree that we experience separation is the degree that we live in delusion. As Thích Nhất Hạnh has wisely said, "We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness." And as we humans do increasingly awaken, we and our families and communities and nation and world will heal and be transformed. 🙏 Molly
Thank you Representative Cori Bush!! Yes, there is enough money for no human being to be unhoused. There just needs to be the will and commitment to dismantling greed and the pathological patriarchal neoliberal predatory capitalist system that is destroying our country, other nations, and the planet with policies and politicians and practices and moral compassionate collective values that honor and respect and protect life rather than destroy it. — Molly
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| Eliseo Fernandez / Reuters |
By Marina Koren
The ocean off the coast of southern Florida is having a long, hot summer. For weeks, surface temperatures hovered around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, before dropping to the 80s last week. The world’s third-largest barrier reef is dying, and scientists are fishing out coral samples and bringing them to the cool safety of laboratory tanks. One spot along the coastline hit triple-digit temperatures last month, conditions you would expect inside a hot tub. Some coastal Floridians skipped their usual dips in the ocean because it didn’t seem appealing anymore.
Marine heat waves—periods of persistent and anomalously high temperatures of surface seawater—have materialized in other parts of the world too. The surface temperatures of about 44 percent of Earth’s oceans are currently experiencing extreme heat, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Some of that warming is to be expected, because 2023 is an El Niño year. But “all of these marine heat waves are made warmer because of climate change,” Dillon Amaya, a research scientist at NOAA’s Physical Sciences Laboratory, told me. June was already a record-breaking month for the world’s oceans, and then July came along and topped it. According to the experimental forecast system that Amaya and his colleagues run at NOAA, half of the world’s oceans may be in the throes of a heat wave by September.
Earth is an ocean planet, a water world. We have not observed anything like it yet in the universe, not even with our best telescopes, and so we cannot know exactly how rare—and thus, how difficult—it may be for the forces of cosmic nature to produce such a thing. And yet, here we are, simmering its oceans at our peril and changing the fundamental makeup of the ecosystem that defines Earth. Our oceans have absorbed most of the excess heat produced by greenhouse-gas emissions in recent decades, serving as a buffer that protects us from the worst effects of climate change. Humans may be sweltering on land this summer, but our planet’s future—and therefore ours—is intimately tied with the sea.
Astronomers have spent years searching for worlds beyond our solar system that might host oceans, in the hopes that they also host life. Of the more than 5,000 planets they’ve found, only a few are in the habitable zone—at the right distance from their star to be conducive to liquid, flowing water. And scientists have yet to confirm that any rocky, Earth-size planets are also wet. Part of the problem is that oceans are difficult to detect with the technology available to researchers today. Our planet may be slick with rolling seas, but “if we were to observe Earth as an exoplanet, from a different system, we could not measure that Earth has water,” Charles Cadieux, an astronomer at the University of Montreal, told me.
Other oceans exist in our very own solar system but are hidden beneath the surface of icy moons, their exact composition unknown to us. Krista Soderlund, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, studies Europa, a moon of Jupiter with a salty subsurface ocean that could harbor microbial life; she spends her days marveling at this other ocean world, all while worrying about the one she lives on. “I don’t really have a way to reconcile that,” Soderlund told me. “You can see the short, rapid changes right now, and then I’m looking forward to how that’s going to affect my kids. How much worse is it going to be?”
Next year, NASA is scheduled to launch the mission that Soderlund is working on: a spacecraft that will reach Europa in 2030. The vessel will carry a plaque engraved with a poem written by the U.S. poet laureate, which reads in part, “O second moon, we, too, are made / of water, of vast and beckoning seas.” This idea of connection, a touch of intimacy in an unfamiliar cosmos, is lovely. Read another way, it sounds almost like an elegy. We are made of vast seas. But when those seas are superheated, dissolving the shells and skeletons of marine creatures and enabling toxic blooms of algae, they beg for relief more than they beckon.
Our planet did not start out with seas. They came later, after Earth had cooled down from its formative molten years. How Earth got its water remains an open question; some researchers believe that it arrived inside asteroids that bombarded Earth several billion years ago, while others suggest that it was locked within the planet since it first formed out of the mountain-size rocks whizzing around the early solar system. This September, a NASA spacecraft will bring home samples from an asteroid that has remained unchanged since that cosmic period, and the rocky bits and pieces could reveal crucial information about our very existence. Scientists hope to uncover clues about the forces that gave rise to Earth’s oceans and enriched them with the chemical compounds that eventually sparked life.
In the face of climate change, the thrill of discovery is tinged with melancholy; as we learn more about how our ocean planet came to be, we’re subjecting its waters to intense heat, and the entire planet is facing the consequences. Hot oceans are melting ice sheets, intensifying hurricanes, and devastating fishing industries. “The Earth has seen a lot of change in its life,” Karen St. Germain, the director of NASA’s Earth-science division, told me. “But we are driving it now in a way that it hasn’t been driven before.”
Astronomers refer to the habitable region around a star as the Goldilocks zone. There, conditions are not too hot and not too cold, but just right for water to lap on alien shores. Earth is squarely in our sun’s habitable zone, and will enjoy its pleasant perch for at least another few billion years, until the sun grows hot enough to truly boil the planet’s oceans away. But Earth may become unlivable long before that: floods, droughts, wildfires, days so hot that touching asphalt can severely burn your skin, hot-tub seas that can roil coral and humans alike.
Last week, the head of the United Nations said, “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.” Climate scientists have cautioned that global boiling is not a scientific term, and that our current spate of extreme weather has been predicted for years. This is global warming, they say, and it’s plenty dramatic. Still, boiling can help emphasize the visceral urgency of what’s happening in the water. Because it is getting more difficult each day to look around and feel that things here are just right.
Please go here for the original article and additional links from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/08/marine-heat-waves-earth-climate-change/674892/
An excellent, well articulated, and deeply important article. Deepest bow of respect and gratitude to Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan for shining bright light on dark places and for their profound and decades long commitment to truth and justice. 🙏 Molly
By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan
Emmett Till would have turned 82 on July 25th. But he was murdered at 14, on August 28th, 1955, dragged from his great-uncle’s home in Money, Mississippi by two white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman. They beat, tortured and shot Emmett, tied a heavy cotton gin fan to him with barbed wire, and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River. His bloated, disfigured corpse was discovered several days later. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, had his body returned to Chicago for his funeral. She insisted on an open casket so the world would see the brutality of bigotry, the ravages of racism. Jet Magazine and other publications carried photos of Emmett Till’s beaten, distended face in his coffin, shocking the world and galvanizing the civil rights movement to defeat Jim Crow.
“I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me,” Mamie Till-Mobley said of her decision. “And if the death of my son can mean something to the other unfortunate people all over the world, then for him to have died a hero would mean more to me than for him just to have died.”
Sixty-eight years later, President Joe Biden formally established the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, signing the proclamation on Emmett Till’s birthday.
Three sites make up the monument: the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ on Chicago’s South Side, where Emmett’s funeral was held; the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Emmett’s two murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury, and the Graball Landing site along the Tallahatchie River, believed to be where Emmett Till’s body was found. The memorial sign at Graball Landing was made bulletproof to withstand the attempts to destroy it. It’s been shot at and vandalized countless times.
The painful history of Emmett Till’s lynching and his mother’s remarkable courage is seared into the fabric of this country. Less than three months later, sickened by the photos of Emmett, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on December 1st, 1955, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The March on Washington in 1963 was held on August 28th, the anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder.
Yet there are people now attempting to suppress history and whitewash the systemic racism so central to our nation. Leading the pack of these revisionists is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate. DeSantis first forced the revision of the state’s AP African American Studies curriculum, purging key Black writers, feminists, and references to Black Lives Matter.
Then, last week,, the Florida Department of Education released its social studies standards for this school year. The 216-page document states, “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Gov. DeSantis was asked to explain this shocking rewrite of the brutal, bloody history of slavery in the United States, while at a campaign stop in Utah:
“They’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”
Renowned civil rights attorney and Florida resident Ben Crump responded on the Democracy Now! news hour. “It is sickening. It is astonishing that in 2023 we can have a person who is the second in contention for the Republican nomination telling his supporters and his state that he governs that it is going to be mandated now that students in Florida, starting from middle school on, will have to be taught that slavery had positive benefits…It has the potential to cause serious psychological trauma to African American students. We will not stand for it. We will explore every possible legal remedy in the court of law.”
The catalog of atrocities during the centuries-long practice of legal enslavement in the U.S. is long: forced labor, beatings, whipping, torture, rape, murder, the separation of families, the denial and criminalization of education, and more. The suggestion that the millions of enslaved people in this country somehow benefitted from their enslavement is simply grotesque.
Of course, many enslaved Africans and their enslaved descendants did learn skills that served them later in life–but these were the skills born of resistance. Harriett Tubman escaped north from Maryland to Philadelphia, and used that hard-earned experience to lead between 11 and 30 dangerous missions to rescue more enslaved people, guiding them to freedom, mostly at night, navigating by the stars.
Legal slavery ended in the United States on December 5th, 1865, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, but its echoes painfully persist to this day. Monuments and memorials are important checks on the whitewashing of history, but strong social movements are the best bulwark against those who would rollback progress.
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| Photo by Molly |
Wow, this is so well said! Originally I thought the movie would be all fluff. And then I started to hear positive experiences and reviews. Now both my husband — who really respects the director — and I plan to see Barbie. Can’t wait! Meanwhile, this review from Jackson Katz gives us some fabulous glimpses. And I couldn't resist adding the picture at the bottom. Ha! 😊💗🙏 Molly
Beautifully and so wisely said. Exquisite image. And YES to the power of beauty. Thank you, Chris Jordan. 🙏 Molly
And excellent article. And yes, the American electorate is indeed headed for a crucial test.
Such chilling times. Everything is on the line. Literally. It isn't "just" that Trump is a narcissistic, sociopathic, authoritarian, fascist wannabe dictator who wants to shred whatever threads of democracy remaining in our country. He also completely denies the human caused catastrophic climate crisis that we are in the midst of and the utter urgency for wide ranging collective national and global cooperative action to try to preserve a habitable planet.
Never before has so very much been at stake — which is absolutely everything, everything!, that we love and cherish. And as Emma Goldman wisely stated over 100 years ago, "The most violent element in society is ignorance." So true! May we all be inspired to be increasingly passionate truth-seekers and truth-tellers. — Molly
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| The former President continues to attract millions of supporters who have such antipathy for Biden and the Democrats that they interpret Trump’s deviance as defiance and his fury as their fury. Getty Images |
To read the stark criminal indictment, returned by a federal grand jury on Tuesday, charging Donald Trump with conspiring to steal the 2020 Presidential election is to realize more deeply than before that the country is headed for a great reckoning—in the courts and at the ballot box. It suggests a question that cannot be escaped: Will the American electorate show itself capable of overlooking a conspiracy to undermine democratic rule and return the chief conspirator to power?
The third and latest indictment against Trump sets out four charges and makes the case against him in the plainest terms. “Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power,” the introduction to the forty-five-page document reads—and where have you seen a more succinct summary of criminal intent?
Or take the opening lines to Count One, Conspiracy to Defraud the United States: “From on or about November 14, 2020, through on or about January 20, 2021, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the Defendant, Donald J. Trump, did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government.”
This indictment is foremost a legal document, not a literary one, but one cannot help thinking that whoever drafted this paragraph and many others like it hoped that its cadences—consonant, rhythmic, startling—would help underline the grave historical stakes. Trump and his co-conspirators retailed “prolific lies” in the cause of denying Joe Biden the Presidency, the indictment insists; they claimed, among other things, that “large numbers of dead, non-resident, non-citizen, or otherwise ineligible voters had cast ballots, or that voting machines had changed votes for the Defendant to votes for Biden.” Trump’s co-conspirators are unnamed but are, according to the Washington Post, likely to include the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, the attorney John Eastman, the former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell, the former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, and the appellate attorney Kenneth Chesebro.
The indictment is a powerful summation of much that we have learned before, but who, in fact, will read it? What minds will it alter? What difference will it make?
The indictment comes just days after a poll conducted by the Times and Siena College showed that the former President is so far ahead of Ron DeSantis and the rest of the Republican field that it is clear that a large portion of the electorate has decided that multiple criminal indictments current and forthcoming—the 2020 election fraud; the hush-money sex-scandal case, in Manhattan; the election-fraud case, in Georgia; the classified-documents case in Florida—will not dissuade them from voting for Trump. The former President continues to attract millions of supporters who have such antipathy for Biden, for the Democrats, for the “corporate media,” for academia, for all the institutions they see as woke and hostile to their interests, that they interpret Trump’s deviance as defiance, his lies as truthtelling, his fury as their fury. DeSantis has proved a robotic, even pathetic campaigner; his unwillingness to attack Trump with any directness or conviction has not so much impressed right-wing voters as it has further convinced them that he is a humorless pill, a pallid imitation. Trump is their leader and, if need be, in the end, their martyr. As Nate Cohn put it in his analysis of the Times’ poll, “The MAGA base doesn’t support Mr. Trump in spite of his flaws. It supports him because it doesn’t seem to believe he has flaws.”
Trump’s reaction to the latest indictment closely resembles his reaction to previous indictments and impeachments. It’s a page from “1984.” In a statement on Truth Social, he compared the prosecutors’ case against him to “Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes.” Predicting that justice and truth would, in the end, be served, his campaign’s statement went on to say, “The un-American witch hunts will fail and President Trump will be re-elected to the White House so he can save our Country from the abuse, incompetence, and corruption that is running through the veins of our Country at levels never seen before.”
Soon enough, there will be a criminal indictment against Trump from Georgia. Four criminal indictments—each one more serious and more convincing than the last. It is hard to calculate the logistics, the legal fees, the courtroom antics.
And yet it still seems quite possible that Trump will be elected President for a second time. In another story in the Times about its poll, a heating and air-conditioning contractor in Phoenix, a Republican in his early forties named John Wittman, said, “Donald Trump is not a Republican, he’s a criminal.” But Wittman’s sense of discernment is anything but dominant. So far, tens of millions of Americans are willing to overlook not only the multiple criminal indictments of Donald Trump but also his lethal mismanagement of covid-19; his inhumane handling of children at the border; his myriad statements of bigotry and misogyny; his assaults on the free press and the rule of law; his indifference to national security and the climate emergency; his affection for autocrats around the world; his impeachments; his many schemes to enrich his family. According to the Times poll, Biden and Trump are tied in a hypothetical rematch at forty-three per cent. Sooner or later, a great reckoning is coming. ♦
Please go here for the original article in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-new-trump-indictment-and-the-reckoning-ahead
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