By Robert A. Vella – July 1st 2023
Here are some intriguing news stories to catch-up on which have been scantily covered by mainstream news organizations or have even been completely ignored. Why is that, you ask, considering the obvious import of these stories? Because the huge corporations which own America’s major news organizations don’t see profitability or are otherwise averse to widely distributing such news items. Anyway, here we go.
First up, the United States is currently experiencing a serious housing shortage resulting from rising interest rates (artificially pushed up by the quasi-governmental Federal Reserve in its far too narrowly conceived attempts to lower inflation), a construction industry which (for various reasons) has neglected to build new affordable housing for many years, and from decades of increasing wealth inequality in the nation which has allowed rich people and corporate entities to buy-up residential properties. Also, an Oxfam report published last month ranks the U.S. at or near the bottom of OECD countries (i.e. the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) regarding the rights and treatment of workers (as detailed recently on this blog as the deliberate goal of neoliberalism).
Next, the state of Delaware (controlled by the Democratic Party, no less) is currently passing a bill through its legislature which would allow corporations to vote in the municipal elections of Seaford. That’s right, folks! While it’s plainly evident that the Republican Party (especially under Donald Trump’s leadership) hates democracy and wants to establish its autocratic fascist rule over America, corporate Democrats have been quietly doing something similar… at least in Delaware. If they get their way, one day the American people will wake up (too late) and find that they no longer have any say in who runs their country and how it is governed.
Third, the covert plot to defeat President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election and put Ronald Reagan in the White House (involving the Iran hostage crisis) has been openly confirmed by one of its conspirators who has decided to come clean before he dies.
Fourth, the latest evidence of climate change indicates that the Southern Ocean’s circulatory system is slowing down, precipitation over mountain regions is shifting from snow to rain, global temperatures are now exceeding the crucial 1.5°C limit to prevent catastrophic effects to civilization, and malaria (once eradicated in the U.S.) has resurfaced in Florida and Texas. Most surprisingly and worrisome is the news from Antarctica because the circulatory changes we’re seeing in the surrounding ocean point towards a more rapid melting of its massive ice sheets (90% of Earth’s total ice and 70% of Earth’s fresh water) which would dramatically raise sea levels and destroy much of the world’s coastal areas where approximately 2.4 billion people currently live.
Lastly, former Navy F/A-18 pilot Ryan Graves chronicled his encounters (earlier this year) with UFOs in 2014 off the U.S. east coast; and, for the very first time, polyextremophiles have been found living in extremely hot and acidic pools in the Horn of Africa which proves that life on Earth (and presumably throughout the universe) is not limited to the familiar terrestrial biology of contemporary science.
U.S. Housing Shortage and its Poor Treatment of Workers
From: An Airbnb collapse won’t fix America’s housing shortage
The US housing market is scary right now, and Americans seem to be scrambling for signs that help is on the way.
This week a viral tweet said Airbnb revenue had fallen off a cliff. But what’s perhaps more interesting than a potentially misleading tweet is the response it got. Many suggested the revenue shortfall would mean more houses would come on the market and help reverse soaring housing prices, which have become unaffordable for many Americans. But like private equity investment in rental homes, short-term rentals like Airbnbs only play a small part in what’s a much bigger problem.
[…]
Even after a slight decline from a year ago, home prices are near their most unaffordable on record, with annual payments for a median home representing 41 percent of the median income, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Meanwhile, the Mortgage Bankers Association found that home buying has never been so unaffordable. That’s all thanks to near-record housing prices combined with mortgage rates not seen in more than a decade.
[…]
Since the Great Recession, home builders haven’t been building enough new homes to keep up with the growing population and the generation of millennials who reached their 30s and are starting families. New home construction had finally been ramping up in the last few years but has experienced a number of setbacks, including the pandemic, supply chain issues, and now — like the home buyers they’re trying to furnish — high costs to borrow money.
From: Where hard work doesn’t pay off – An index of US labor policies compared to peer nations
Policies that support and protect working families vary greatly by country. How is the US doing compared to its peers?
According to our research: not well. The US is falling drastically behind similar countries in mandating adequate wages, protections, and rights for millions of workers and their families. The wealthiest country in the world is near the bottom of every dimension of this index.
The index assesses labor policies in each of the 38 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). These countries compare to the US in that they commit to democracy and free-market economies, and have relatively robust GDPs.
Delaware allows Corporations to Vote in Municipal Elections
For local elections in the United States, voting eligibility rules differ from place to place. But usually the baseline requirement is that voters be humans who are alive and voting on their own behalf.
Some municipalities in Delaware, however, have broadened the definition of a voter to include “artificial entities” such as businesses, LLCs, partnerships and trusts.
Delaware is famously one of the world’s most welcoming places for companies of all kinds and sizes to incorporate for legal and tax purposes. (More on that in a minute.) But welcoming businesses directly into the ballot box by some localities takes that welcoming a step further – and in the eyes of many a step too far.
Opponents to the idea include Common Cause Delaware, a citizens lobby that among other things advocates for voter rights and opposes the influence of big money in state government. Letting businesses vote in municipal elections dilutes the voice of the citizenry and “puts the idea that corporations are people on steroids,” said its executive director, Claire Snyder-Hall.
The Plot to Elect Ronald Reagan is Revealed
From: A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election
By Peter Baker – March 18, 2023
WASHINGTON — It has been more than four decades, but Ben Barnes said he remembers it vividly. His longtime political mentor invited him on a mission to the Middle East. What Mr. Barnes said he did not realize until later was the real purpose of the mission: to sabotage the re-election campaign of the president of the United States.
It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency and hampered his effort to win a second term. Mr. Carter’s best chance for victory was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day. That was something that Mr. Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent.
His mentor was John B. Connally Jr., a titan of American politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Mr. Connally had sought the Republican nomination in 1980 only to be swamped by former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Now Mr. Connally resolved to help Mr. Reagan beat Mr. Carter and in the process, Mr. Barnes said, make his own case for becoming secretary of state or defense in a new administration.
What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.
Then shortly after returning home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.
[…]
… Mr. Casey was alleged to have met with representatives of Iran in July and August 1980 in Madrid leading to a deal supposedly finalized in Paris in October in which a future Reagan administration would ship arms to Tehran through Israel in exchange for the hostages being held until after the election.
Worsening Climate News
From: Oceanographers share serious concerns about changes in ocean current: These changes ‘are a big deal’
Melting Antarctic ice has slowed an important ocean current that helps regulate the Earth’s climate, and scientists are worried about the consequences, including rising sea levels and changing weather patterns.
What’s happening?
A recent study revealed that a deep ocean current called the Southern Ocean overturning circulation has slowed down by about 30% since the 1990s. According to the Guardian, this current is important in regulating the Earth’s climate, including rainfall and warming patterns, along with how much heat and carbon dioxide the oceans store. What’s more, scientists expect a 40% slow down by 2050.
[…]
It could also accelerate global warming because of the slowing absorption of heat and carbon dioxide in the world’s oceans. Plus, it could impact food security and threaten marine animals.
From: Warming causes more extreme rain, not snow, over mountains. Scientists say that’s a problem
A warming world is transforming some major snowfalls into extreme rain over mountains instead, somehow worsening both dangerous flooding like the type that devastated Pakistan last year as well as long-term water shortages, a new study found.
Using rain and snow measurements since 1950 and computer simulations for future climate, scientists calculated that for every degree Fahrenheit the world warms, extreme rainfall at higher elevation increases by 8.3% (15% for every degree Celsius), according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature.
Heavy rain in mountains causes a lot more problems than big snow, including flooding, landslides and erosion, scientists said. And the rain isn’t conveniently stored away like snowpack that can recharge reservoirs in spring and summer.
On Thursday [June 15th 2023], the European Union’s climate agency said global surface air temperatures briefly rose by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels earlier this month for the first time ever. That’s the maximum global temperature rise agreed to under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
Here in New York, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said Thursday countries must immediately phase out the burning of coal, oil and gas, calling them incompatible with human survival. Guterres also accused fossil fuel companies of attempting to “knee-cap” progress on the climate crisis.
From: Rare homegrown malaria cases in the US force health advisory, but don’t panic yet – Florida and Texas have both issued health advisories for the mosquito-borne illness
Malaria is most common in warm climates and some scientists worry that as the Earth warms, more regions will be affected by the disease. According to a 2022 study published in Nature, climate change can exacerbate a full 58 percent of the infectious diseases that humans come in contact with around the world. The authors of that study note that hepatitis can be spread by flooding, droughts can bring in rodents that are infected with hantavirus, and warmer temperatures can lengthen the life of mosquitoes carrying malaria.
UFOs and the Possibility of Extraterrestrial Life
From: We Have a Real UFO Problem. And It’s Not Balloons
Story by By Ryan Graves • Feb 28
On a clear, sunny day in April 2014, two F/A-18s took off for an air combat training mission off the coast of Virginia. The jets, part of my Navy fighter squadron, climbed to an altitude of 12,000 and steered towards Warning Area W-72, an exclusive block of airspace ten miles east of Virginia Beach. All traffic into the training area goes through a single GPS point at a set altitude — almost like a doorway into a massive room where military jets can operate without running into other aircraft. Just at the moment the two jets crossed the threshold, one of the pilots saw a dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere — motionless against the wind, fixed directly at the entry point. The jets, only 100 feet apart, zipped past the object on either side. The pilots had come so dangerously close to something they couldn’t identify that they terminated the training mission immediately and returned to base.
“I almost hit one of those damn things!” the flight leader, still shaken by the incident, told us shortly after in the pilots’ ready room. We all knew exactly what he meant. “Those damn things” had been plaguing us for the previous eight months.
I joined the U.S. Navy in 2009 and underwent years of rigorous training as a pilot. Specifically, we are trained to be expert observers in identifying aircraft with our sensors and our own eyes. It’s our job to know what’s in our operating area. That’s why, in 2014, after upgrades were made to our radar system, our squadron made a startling discovery: There were unknown objects in our airspace.
Initially, the objects were showing up on our newly upgraded radars and we assumed they were “ghosts in the machine,” or software glitches. But then we began to correlate the radar tracks with multiple surveillance systems, including infrared sensors that detected heat signatures. Then came the hair-raising near misses that required us to take evasive action.
These were no mere balloons. The unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) accelerated at speeds up to Mach 1, the speed of sound. They could hold their position, appearing motionless, despite Category 4 hurricane-force winds of 120 knots. They did not have any visible means of lift, control surfaces or propulsion — in other words nothing that resembled normal aircraft with wings, flaps or engines. And they outlasted our fighter jets, operating continuously throughout the day. I am a formally trained engineer, but the technology they demonstrated defied my understanding.
In a surreal landscape of colours, dominated by luminescent ponds of yellows and greens, boiling hot water bubbles up like a cauldron, whilst poisonous chlorine and sulphur gases choke the air.
Known as the “gateway to hell”, the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia is scorchingly hot and one of the most alien places on Earth. Yet a recent expedition to the region has found it is teeming with life.
In the heart of the Horn of Africa, the Danakil Depression is one of the most remote, inhospitable and least-studied locations in the world. It lies over 330ft (100m) below sea level in a volcanic area in north-west Ethiopia, close to the border with Eritrea, aptly named “Afar”. It is part of the East African Rift System, a place where the Earth’s internal forces are currently tearing apart three continental plates, creating new land.
The violent landscape is arguably the hottest place on the planet, and one of the driest. The temperature regularly reaches 45C (113F). It rarely rains, but seas of molten magma ooze just beneath the crust’s surface. There are two highly active volcanoes: one of them, Erta Ale, is one of only a handful of volcanoes to have an active, bubbling lava lake at its summit. The area is also littered with acid ponds and geysers, and features a deep crater called Dallol.
The vibrant colours are a result of rain and seawater from the nearby coast being heated by magma and rising up. The salt from the seawater reacts with the volcanic minerals in the magma, creating dazzling colours. In the hottest and most acidic pools, sulphur and salt react to form bright yellow chimneys. In cooler pools, copper salts create bright turquoise.
[…]
In March 2017, Cavalazzi’s lab and their colleagues found life in Danakil, after they managed to isolate and extract DNA from bacteria. They found that the bacteria are “polyextremophiles”, which means they are adapted to extreme acidity, high temperatures and high salinity all at once. It is the first absolute confirmation of microbial life in the Danakil acidic pools.
The Secular Jurist 