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From the GNR Newsroom: Its the Good News Roundup [1]

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Date: 2022-08-08

Hey all, welcome to the Monday Good News Roundup. The GNR Newsroom (Bhu and Killer300) have got me a big bundle of stories this week, so we’re gonna keep it short and get right to the good stuff.

But first, we got to get to the big one.

x This is a long time coming. Advocates and frontline communities have been calling for many of this bill’s provisions since before the current Congress was even elected, but grassroots activists and our Senate champions have finally gotten a reconciliation bill out of the chamber. https://t.co/Y2DihN0EPp — Indivisible Guide (@IndivisibleTeam) August 7, 2022

The Inflation bill made it out of the Senate! *hits buttons and streamers fall from the ceiling* if this passes the house next, its gonna probably be the biggest thing Biden has passed in his presidency. So big ups to our people in congress. Lets win big in November and keep this train going.

Fifty-eight percent of voters in the U.S. would prefer to vote for political candidates who support action to combat climate change, and only 17% want candidates who oppose action, according to polling conducted in April and May of this year.

Unsurprising. Its been a hot and miserable summer where I am, and its only gonna get worse unless we get a handle on global warming. So lets vote in some people who will do things about it.

The new bill falls short of the $555 billion in climate spending in the Build Back Better legislation that was scuttled by Manchin last year, as well as the provisions of the bill passed by House Democrats earlier this year. But it does direct tens of billions of dollars toward extending tax credits to the deployment and manufacturing of a long list of technologies, including wind and solar power, batteries, nuclear power, hydrogen production, electric vehicles, heat pumps and emissions-reduction systems. “This bill really represents a tremendous step toward smart investments and forward-looking industrial policy that can make the United States the arsenal of clean energy technology,” said Harry Godfrey, managing director at trade group Advanced Energy Economy. The bill targets both short-term relief from the ballooning fossil fuel costs driving inflation and long-term investments in industrial capacity, he said.

So not everything we wanted, but something, and a promise of more to come in the future.

When Donna Corbelli Castro moved to her home in South Florida 25 years ago, her yard was “stark, barren, hot and devoid of any trees,” she says. The typical way to tackle this would have been to do what many of her neighbors had done: lay down a tidy, manicured lawn, perhaps with a couple of little bushes or decorative plants. But as a horticulturist, Castro had a different vision: a yard brimming with native trees and shrubs. She promptly set about creating a “mini forest” in front of her house. Today, there is virtually no lawn space in Castro’s yard. Instead, it’s a gorgeous homegrown wildlife sanctuary that attracts and nourishes a wide range of local pollinators.

Down with lawns, up with miniature forests in front of your house.

aby boomers are often derided for not taking the climate crisis seriously enough. According to a Gallup poll, 56% of Americans 55 and older said they worried about climate change “a great deal or fair amount,” compared with 70% of Americans ages 18 to 34. But many do feel responsible for the climate crisis. According to a recent AARP–NORC poll, 45% of Americans over 50 say their generation made climate change worse (22% said they were leaving the environment better off). Some, like Pollock, say they plan to dedicate the next stage of their lives to the climate movement. Pollack is a volunteer with Third Act, an organization that mobilizes Americans over age 60 for “progressive change.” Co-founded in 2021 by activist and journalist Bill McKibben, the group has 20 working groups across the country.

It can be easy to fall into the trap of blaming Boomers for all our problems and casting them as the villains of our lives, but lets remember that simply is not the case. Fight the real enemy.

Russia is one of the most unequal countries in the world. The poorest half of the population owns 17% of national income, while the richest 500 people own 40% of financial assets in the country. Official statistics suggest that labour relations in Russia are amicable and settled, and there are practically no disputes or strikes – but, unsurprisingly, this is far from the full story. Sociologist Pyotr Bizyukov is trying to paint a true picture of worker resistance in Russia by monitoring labour protests across the country. And according to him, there were almost 400 such protests in Russia in 2021. Workers not only down tools and walk off the job, Bizyukov says, but they sometimes resort to more radical actions – including hunger strikes, threats of taking their own lives and even the murder of their employers.

Wow, Russian labor movements do not mess around. Give em Hell my dudes.

Progress that is both rapid enough to be noticed and stable enough to continue over many generations has been achieved only once in human history: right now. Around 1800, humanity made a stark turn from misery and stagnation to prosperity and progress. This is a truly unique moment in time, and yet one that most of us aren’t even aware of.

We are living in a better time than any other time in human history, with the potential to get better in the future, and we don’t even realize it. That’s some good news if I ever heard it.

While being cross-examined at his defamation trial in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday, Alex Jones was informed that his attorneys accidentally sent two years of text messages from his cellphone to a lawyer for the Sandy Hook parents suing him — and then failed to note that the messages were protected under attorney-client privilege.

And then there’s this asshole. Alex Jones is what you would get if a school yard bully became a grownup using the fortune teller machine from the movie Big. Also he has to pay a ton of money to the Sandy Hook parents for spewing his crap. Hopefully that will shut him up for good.

Republican senators were surprised by Tuesday’s huge win for abortion rights in Kansas, of all places, even as they sought to downplay the electoral implications for their party ahead of November’s midterm elections. “It’s definitely a wake-up call for us,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) acknowledged on Wednesday.

Lindsey Graham, another one of these jokers that needs to go away and not come back. Also, Kansas was not a wake up call for the GOP, it was a funeral dirge.

he U.S. Senate on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed a resolution approving Finland and Sweden's request to join the NATO, a pivotal step toward expanding the 30-member transatlantic military alliance. The bipartisan show of support for Finland and Sweden's accession to NATO is a direct response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, an act of aggression that has alarmed U.S. and European officials. The vote was 95-1. Finland and Sweden's bid to join NATO will need to win approval from all other NATO countries, a process that could take months and that, when completed, would grant Article Five protection to the two historically neutral countries.

Bad news for Putin, which is good news for the rest of the world.

Predicting the structures of proteins is very time consuming, and having a tool with 200 million readily available protein structures will save researchers a lot of time, said Mohammed AlQuraishi, a systems biologist at Columbia University, who is not involved in DeepMind’s research. AlphaFold could also help scientists to reassess previous research to better understand how diseases happen, Peng said. However, for many proteins “we’re interested in understanding how their structure is altered by mutations and natural allelic variation, and that won’t be addressed by this database,” said AlQuraishi. “But of course the field is developing fast, and so I expect tools to accurately model protein variants will begin to appear soon,” he added.

Fascinating stuff. I don’t fully understand it myself but it sounds great.

Scientists have made a “promising” advance towards developing a universal coronavirus vaccine to tackle Covid-19 and the common cold. Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London have discovered that a specific area of the spike protein of Sars-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid-19 – is a good target for a pan-coronavirus jab that could offer protection against all the Covid-19 variants and common colds. Developing a vaccine that protects against a number of different coronaviruses is a huge challenge, they said, because this family of viruses have many key differences, frequently mutate and generally induce incomplete protection against reinfection. That is why people can repeatedly catch common colds, and why it is possible to be infected multiple times with different variants of Sars-CoV-2.

A universal COVID vaccine would be good, curing the common cold is just gravy at this point.

Four species of critically endangered vulture have returned to a park in southern Malawi from which they disappeared more than 20 years ago, and their comeback is credited to the reintroduction of cheetahs, lions and the carcasses the cats left behind, conservationists say. In 2017, seven cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) were reintroduced to Liwonde National Park under a project run by African Parks and the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT), two conservation groups working in partnership with Malawi’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW). Within days, and with the cheetahs still in their acclimatization pen or boma, the vultures showed up.

Slowly but surely we are helping nature heal.

The budget reconciliation bill that Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., agreed to with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., could save up to 3,900 lives per year by 2030, thanks to reduced air pollution, according to a new study from the nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation. The bill, known as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), contains $369 billion in spending to address climate change over 10 years, in addition to other provisions, including closing tax loopholes and holding down the rate of increase in the cost of prescription medication.

Makes me glad they got this passed. I am very excited.

A man who has lived with HIV since the 1980s seems to have been cured in only the fourth such case, say doctors. He was given a bone marrow transplant to treat blood cancer leukaemia from a donor who was naturally resistant to the virus. The 66-year-old, who does not want to be identified, has stopped taking HIV medication. He said he was "beyond grateful" the virus could no longer be found in his body. The man is known as the "City of Hope" patient after the hospital where he was treated in Duarte, California. Many of his friends died from HIV in the era before antiretroviral drugs could give people a near-normal life expectancy.

We’re slowly but surely curing AIDS Y’all.

Overall, 2.5% of workers – about 4 million – switched jobs on average each month from January to March 2022. This share translates into an annual turnover of 30% of workers – nearly 50 million – if it is assumed that no workers change jobs more than once a year. It is higher than in 2021, when 2.3% of workers switched employers each month, on average. About a third (34%) of workers who left a job from January to March 2022 – either voluntarily or involuntarily – were with a new employer the following month. When it comes to the earnings of job switchers, the share finding higher pay has increased since the year following the start of the pandemic. From April 2020 to March 2021, some 51% of job switchers saw an increase in real earnings over the same months the previous year. On the other hand, among workers who did not change employers, the share reporting an increase in real earnings decreased from 54% over the 2020-21 period to 47% over the 2021-22 period. Put another way, the median worker who changed employers saw real gains in earnings in both periods, while the median worker who stayed in place saw a loss during the April 2021 to March 2022 period.1 Perhaps not coincidentally, Americans cited low pay as one of the top reasons why they quit their job last year in a Pew Research Center survey conducted in February 2022.

Remember, the boss needs you more than you need him. You can always do better.

DUBLIN, July 28 (Reuters) - The Irish government on Thursday agreed targets to limit carbon emissions in key sectors of the economy after the leaders of coalition partners the Green Party, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael compromised on a 25% cut for the agricultural sector. Ireland's agriculture sector is responsible for around 38% of the country's greenhouse gas emissions, and the target replaces a range of between 22% and 30% set out in last November's Climate Action Plan.

Hooray! Give it up for one of the lands of my forefathers. Ireland represent!

And for our final bit of good news, lets turn it over to Merrick Garland.

Lets hope that justice is served.

Wow, that was a big week. So much good news. I know I’m pumped for the coming week. I’ll see you all next week with more good news. Stay frosty all.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/8/2115128/-From-the-GNR-Newsroom-Its-the-Good-News-Roundup

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