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Good News Roundup for Friday, November 3, 2023: Truth Brings Hope [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-11-03
Welcome 🌻 to Friday’s Roundup of Good News!
I am so sick of lies. The Rs have lied so much, that their nonsense — and so much is clearly nonsense — have taken root. The lies can be so pervasive that we feel helpless. I mean, when people won’t accept logic, what can you do?
The lies are really just another way to demoralize us. Here are some lies that we are countering through action:
“Reaganomics, trickle-down economics: the absurd theory that somehow giving tax breaks to the rich makes everyone wealthier.” I remember when it came out, the first Bush called it “voo-doo economics” — until he was fobbed off with the vice presidency. Anyway, these days, thanks to so many actions by Biden-Harris and their team, we are seeing improvements in wealth, tiny unemployment, reduciion in inflation, and a return of investments in the US. (Note there are times when a local government might want to support new investments, e.g. adding a bus route so people can reach their new place of work).
“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” This is such nonsense, but it made it seem impossible to get anything done. Still, gun laws work and many were passed. Despite the terrible gun violence that dominates the headlines, we are making progress (see below). Yes, we have much more to do, but there are good signs. The public wants progress on this and the NRA has been losing money and spending what it has on legal fees.
“Vaccinations cause whatever.” Now, I always had some sympathy here, because the pharmaceutical industry is not always honest. It’s really hard to get the unwilling to get vaccinated, but it’s great to see people doing better health-wise in blue states.
With their lies — lies repeated by so many — they are trying to teach us to despair. Do not yield. Do what needs to be done, do what is right and true. Truth brings hope. Just by saying the truth, by repeating it — gently, but speaking with confidence — you will make a difference.
Also, what lies are you tired of hearing?
Come on in, dear gnusies, and see what other good guys are doing!
Regular Scheduled Programming
No one here is naïve; we are aware of the many who are fighting to destroy our country. Some of us expected it: the cheating, the lying, the chaos, and yes, even the attempts to cling to power despite the clear will of the people. But we are here to read the efforts and the positive results of those (including us and our fellow gnus) who are working so hard to save our country from those very bad people. We are furious with them for what they are doing and we are letting them know. Remember:
💙 There are more of us than there are of them.
💛 They are terrified when we organize. THERE IS LOTS OF EVIDENCE THAT THEY ARE TERRIFIED!
💔 They want us to be demoralized. The best way to keep up your spirits is to fight. So, take the time to recharge your batteries, but find ways to contribute to the well-being of our country and our world.
🗽 Biden as President ! 🗽
Biden, Harris and their administration have been hard at work. Here are the last week’s posts at the White House briefing room.
👎 Out with the Bad, In with the Good 👍
At long last, some progress!
x BREAKING NEWS: The Senate has just confirmed Admiral Lisa Franchetti as Chief of Naval Operations.
She’s from Rochester, a graduate of Pittsford Mendon High School.
She’s now the first woman ever to lead the United States Navy.
New York is so proud of Admiral Franchetti. pic.twitter.com/F53RHZz0jJ — Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) November 2, 2023
And:
x GREAT NEWS: After serving in an acting capacity since September because of Tommy Tuberville’s military blockade, the Senate just confirmed Gen. David Allvin to be the Air Force Chief of Staff, filling the last vacancy in the Joint Chiefs of Staff office. Screw Tommy Tuberville. — Victor Shi (@Victorshi2020) November 2, 2023
Maine town drives out Nazi group Kelly Weill The Daily Beast
A Maine neo-Nazi is pulling up stakes on his planned white supremacist compound, after pressure from locals resulted in his ban from a local gym, and his friend’s ban from AirBnB. Christopher Pohlhaus is the founder of the fascist group “Blood Tribe,” which has held small hate rallies harassing minority groups across the country. Alongside those attention-seeking rallies, Pohlhaus has also advertised a property in rural Maine as a future headquarters for his Nazis. But Mainers were none too thrilled about their new neighbors, The Daily Beast reported this year. Now, after local opposition, Pohlhaus has sold the property, the Bangor Daily News first reported on Tuesday.
Gun laws are making a difference Patrick Sharkey, Megan Kang Epidemiology
Abstract Background: The recent rise of gun violence may lead to the perception that the problem of gun mortality in the United States is intractable. This article provides evidence to counter this perception by bringing attention to the period spanning from 1991 to 2016 when most US states implemented more restrictive gun laws. Over this period, the United States experienced a decline in household gun ownership, and gun-related deaths fell sharply. Methods: The main analysis examines the conditional association between the change in gun regulations at the state level and the change in gun mortality from 1991 to 2016. We include a range of robustness checks and two instrumental variable analyses to allow for stronger causal inferences. Results: We find strong, consistent evidence supporting the hypothesis that restrictive state gun policies reduce overall gun deaths, homicides committed with a gun, and suicides committed with a gun. Each additional restrictive gun regulation a given state passed from 1991 to 2016 was associated with -0.21 (95% confidence interval = -0.33, -0.08) gun deaths per 100,000 residents. Further, we find that specific policies, such as background checks and waiting periods for gun purchases, were associated with lower overall gun death rates, gun homicide rates, and gun suicide rates. Conclusion: State regulations passed from 1991 to 2016 were associated with substantial reductions in gun mortality. We estimate that restrictive state gun policies passed in 40 states from 1991 to 2016 averted 4297 gun deaths in 2016 alone, or roughly 11% of the total gun deaths that year.
💣 Republicans: Party of Crimes and Chaos 💣
Sometimes people can be shamed. ND top R guy departs only one week into job Jack Dura, AP via Yahoo News
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — Only a week into the job, the North Dakota Republican Party's executive director has resigned after a media outlet publicized some of his social media posts that were demeaning toward women and dismissed concerns raised by Black people about racism. The party announced the resignation Monday of Dave Roetman, who previously worked for the South Dakota GOP. He quit seven days after being hired and a few days after Forum News Service reported about his posts and replies on X, formerly known as Twitter. The posts dated from just over a year ago to as recently as this month. Many of the posts and replies were about political issues. But they also included crass comments, such as replying “she seems nice” to several posts of women in revealing clothing, and responding unfavorably to a woman in a plus-sized swimsuit. In another reply, he speculated about whether women should be addressed as “broads” or “dames,” adding that debates about gender and language are why “men are distancing themselves from women professionally.”
GOP can’t govern Jennifer Rubin Washington Post
And many of the more reasonable (more reasonable is a low bar) are retiring, and they will be replaced with something worse. This is the devolution in progress.
🚚 💙 Democrats Deliver 💙 🚚
A Democrat delivers some truth to the lies of Marjorie Taylor Greene
x I just had to explain to my Republican colleague from Georgia that Robert E. Lee was not a founding father. It’s been a very long day on the House floor. pic.twitter.com/vu8yRLMPpR — Congresswoman Chellie Pingree 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 (@chelliepingree) November 3, 2023
President Biden still working to relieve student debt Summer Concepcion NBC News
The Biden administration is proposing a new plan to forgive student debt, months after the Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s sweeping pandemic-era debt relief plan in June. The Education Department on Monday released a student debt relief proposal that would target four categories of borrowers: those with federal student loan balances that exceed the original borrowed amount; those with loans that entered into repayment 25 years ago or more; those with loans for career training programs that led to “unreasonable debt loads or provided insufficient earnings”; and those who are eligible for forgiveness under other repayment plans but have not applied for it. The department also said it is considering student debt relief for a fifth group of borrowers "experiencing financial hardship that the current student loan system does not currently adequately address." “President Biden and I are committed to helping borrowers who’ve been failed by our country’s broken and unaffordable student loan system,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement, adding that the aid would build upon $127 billion in loan forgiveness the administration has approved for about 3.6 million borrowers.
President Biden protecting retirement security White House Briefing Room
Right now, when a financial adviser provides retirement advice, they may be paid by the saver or by the firm who makes the investment product they recommend. Responsible retirement advisers deserve to be paid for their important work. But when a firm pays a retirement adviser more to recommend a specific investment product, that creates a conflict of interest that often leads to Americans selecting an investment product recommended to them that generates lower returns. And these conflicts of interest are meaningful: an adviser may receive a commission as high as 6.5 percent to recommend some insurance products. When the saver pays for advice that is not in their best interest, and it comes at a hidden cost to their lifetime savings, that’s a junk fee. ✂️
That’s why today, as part of his broader Bidenomics agenda to grow the economy from the middle out and bottom up, President Biden is announcing that the Department of Labor will propose a new rule to close loopholes and require that financial advisers provide retirement advice in the best interest of the saver, rather than chasing the highest payday. This step would minimize junk fees in retirement products, promote competition, and protect American workers’ retirements. Specifically, the rule would: Close loopholes so that recommendations to purchase any investment product must be in the savers’ best interest. ✂️
Cover advice to roll assets out of an employer-sponsored plan like a 401(k). ✂️
Cover advice to plan sponsors about which investments to make available as options in 401(k)s and other employer-sponsored plans. When advisers make recommendations to plan sponsors, including small employers, about which investments to include in 401(k) and other employer-sponsored plans, that advice is not subject to the SEC’s Regulation Best Interest and right now is not required to be in the customer’s best interest. Since most Americans primarily save for retirement through their employers, making sure the investments available to them are in their best interest is critically important. The proposed rule builds on the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to eliminate junk fees, putting cash back in the pockets of Americans. The Federal Trade Commission proposed a rule that would ban businesses from charging hidden and misleading fees and require them to show the full price up front and a “click-to-cancel” rule making it as easy to sign up for a service as to cancel it. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau took action to require large banks and credit unions to provide basic information to consumers without charging fees. The Department of Transportation has proposed several new rules that would lead to more transparent pricing by airlines and reimburse customers when there are significant changes to their flight.
What they are saying about the Biden-Harris Affordable Connectivity programs:
Elected Officials California Congresswoman Doris Matsui: “Today, President Biden outlined a robust funding package that will help us secure our technological future and deliver for the American people. Fast, reliable broadband access determines who gets to participate in the modern economy. That is why I have been such a staunch advocate of the Affordable Connectivity Program, which has proven its ability to help us close the digital divide and get Americans online. It is imperative that we do not let this program lapse.” [Statement, 10/25/2023] African American Mayors Association: “It is great to see the Biden @WhiteHouse fighting to fund ACP. Black communities are disproportionately impacted by the broadband affordability gap. ACP is the best tool we have to close the digital divide. We need Congress to extend funding.” [Statement, 10/27/2023] National Black Caucus of State Legislators (NBCSL): “We urge Congress to fund critical domestic needs to support families, expand connectivity, and contribute to disaster relief aid.” [Tweet, 10/26/2023] Public Interest and Digital Advocacy Groups Executive Director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, Angela Siefer: “Along with librarians, digital navigators, and nonprofit leaders from 1,500 organizations nationwide, NDIA celebrates the White House’s renewed commitment to providing internet for all.” [Statement, 10/25/2023] Distinguished Fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy and Benton Institute Senior Fellow, Gigi Sohn: “Kudos to the White House for including $6 billion in the domestic supplemental for the Affordable Connectivity Program, the monthly broadband subsidy for low-income, tribal and high cost households. It’s critical that everyone is connected to the Internet!” [Tweet, 10/25/2023] Open Technology Institute: “The @WhiteHouse just urged Congress to fund the #AffordableConnectivityProgram through December 2024. Congress: The ball is in your court. Act now to help millions of American households get connected—and stay connected—with high-speed #broadband.” [Tweet, 10/25/2023] R Street Institute, Jonathan Cannon: “ACP has proven itself to be one of the better broadband programs and has made strides to addressing the affordability gap of the digital divide. With funds due to lapse, Congress is in a position to improve and continue this program that could replace other programs.” [Tweet, 10/26/2025] Chief Advocacy and Engagement Officer of AARP, Nancy A. LeaMond: “AARP, which advocates for the more than 100 million Americans age 50 and older, urges you to support critical funding, included in the President’s domestic supplemental request, for the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). ACP is essential to millions of households’ ability to participate in all parts of modern digital life. From remote work, virtual education and upskilling, telehealth, and even paying bills, being online is an integral part of our daily lives. Affordable high-speed internet service is especially important for older Americans, many on fixed incomes, who have too often been left behind. The ACP, created by the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, has helped more than 21 million households—including 9.3 million age 50 and older—get and stay online. Unfortunately, if the funding for ACP is allowed to run out, millions of older Americans will once again lose access to affordable internet service. Without ACP, despite spending billions of dollars on broadband infrastructure, there will be fewer customers on the other end who can afford the service. AARP is strongly committed to ensuring affordable high-speed internet service is within reach for older Americans who rely on it for so much of their daily lives.” [Letter, 10/26/2023] EducationSuperHighway: “21M households rely on the Affordable Connectivity Program to get internet service and stay online. We applaud @whitehouse $6B domestic funding request to extend the #ACP, which is critical to closing the #broadband affordability gap and #digitaldivide.” [Tweet, 10/25/2023] Founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, James P. Steyer: “Common Sense Media applauds the Biden Administration for its continued support of the ACP and FCC Chairwoman Rosenworcel for her work to ensure the ACP can meet its commitments to the 21 million American households that rely on the program. If Congress lets the funding dry up, millions of low-income Americans would be cut off from the connectivity they need for their family’s education, health care, job opportunities, or access to critical online services. Our research also found that the loss of the ACP would have a negative impact on America’s recent investments in broadband infrastructure that are critical to ensuring every home and business in America has affordable connectivity. Congress and the President must work together now to keep this from happening. The President’s request to Congress is a critical step in the right direction, but we must continue our efforts to make the ACP and internet affordability permanent.” [Statement, 10/25/2023] Executive Director of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, Adrianne B. Furniss: “There is no question that access to affordable, reliable, high-speed broadband is essential to full participation in modern life in the United States. Although the many benefits of broadband adoption should be broadly enjoyed by all, the digital divide disproportionately affects communities of color and lower-income and rural areas. Affordability is a major barrier to broadband adoption. Today, the Biden Administration again demonstrated its commitment to getting and keeping everyone connected. Now we ask Congress to deliver on that commitment by continuing to fund the very successful, very popular, very bipartisan ACP. The investment we make now will strengthen families and communities, and help ensure the success of the historic support the federal government has made available for deploying broadband networks.” [Statement, 10/25/2023] Senior Policy Counsel for Next Century Cities, Ryan Johnston: “This funding request is an essential step forward. For months municipal officials and community-based organizations have been grappling with the ‘what ifs’ of the ACP’s potential end. Congress must work quickly to grant this funding request to prevent the disconnection of millions of Households.” [Tweet, 10/25/2023] Executive Director of the Project to Get Older Adults onLine (Project GOAL), Debra Berlyn: “Great news that the White House has called on Congress for funding to continue the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) through 2024 to help connect low-income households, including many who are older adults.” [Statement, 10/26/2023] Hispanic Federation: “We are thrilled that the @WhiteHouse has announced a funding package that includes an additional $6 billion of support for the #ACP. We thank the Biden Administration for this important request. and will continue to speak with our elected leaders in Congress!” [Tweet, 10/25/2023]
💜 Unity? 💜
Working together to protect rainforests Cristen Hemingway Jaynes EcoWatch
Two-thirds of the land-based biodiversity and 80 percent of the tropical forests in the world are located in three tropical forest basins: Congo, Amazon and Asia-Pacific. These rainforest ecosystems also provide the livelihoods for more than a billion people, a press release from WWF said. Last week, government officials and heads of state met for three days in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, for the Three Basins Summit to discuss collaboration on ending deforestation and protecting, restoring and sustainably managing these essential and irreplaceable ecosystems. While the Three Basins nations agreed to cooperate on conservation, an official alliance was not formed, according to a press release from WWF.
📥 Actions You Can Take 📤
Tax-exempt organization complaint referrals. 13909. You can fill this out for the NRA and lots of other organizations. How about if some of us white folk go into some of the MAGA churches and video record what they’re saying?
Voting rights. This may be the biggest issue threatening our democracy right now. Besides contacting your representatives at the state and federal level to do the right thing (depending on who they are), you can support and contact these organizations:
ACLU — American Civil Liberties Union
Democracy Docket — founded by Marc Elias, so important in fighting the challenges after the last election.
Fair Fight — founded by Stacey Abrams
🌱Grass roots. Biden and Harris can do the top-down stuff, but we have to support from the bottom. I don’t know how to deprogram 75 million people, but some things have been written about, such as deep canvassing, and lots of people are talking about this. If you know someone (who did not storm the Capitol), then see if you can be pleasant. Instead of trying to reason with them (logic is obviously not their strong point) distract them with something else. We need to remove the sources of lies and to take down the temperature. If we get more of the Rs to wear masks and to get vaccinated and to vote for Ds, the country will be a better place. We need to coax some of them out of the rabbit holes and diffuse the anger and the crazy.
🏃 Run for something. If you want to run for something, but have no idea what to do, these people will help you. They also like money and volunteers to help those people who are running, so even if you’re not in a position to stand for office, you can help. Note: they are especially planning to target the 57 Rs in local governments who participated in the insurrection.
👎 Defund the seditionists. Defund the seditionists. This is a list with companies that sometimes have donated to the seditionists. The list is long. You will recognize many of the corporations, and you probably have a relationship with some — either you are a customer, a shareholder, or maybe even an employee. Contact them and compliment or complain, but let them know you are watching. Forward it to others.
🔎 Want to check out what’s going on with campaign contributions? Check out this diary. 👀
🐍 Schadenfreude 😈
FAFO time! I’m enjoying this:
x BREAKING: California bar finds John Eastman culpable for violations of legal ethics rules. Matter now moves to a punishment stage -- where Eastman could be suspended, or DISBARRED permanently. — Tristan Snell (@TristanSnell) November 2, 2023
A bit on the tRump trials (there are so many, it is not possible to keep track). But in New York City:
x Unbelievable. Eric testified today and basically just lost the entire case.
1) After testifying he “never heard” about the Trump org statement of financial condition until recently, he later admitted that he knew about it in 2013.
2) After saying he never worked on it, he was… pic.twitter.com/i6vJ8d8QJD — Mary L Trump (@MaryLTrump) November 2, 2023
Gee, who knew lying about your numbers was bad? Then there’s DC:
x Trump leveled profane 30-minute 'tantrum' at his own lawyer over D.C. trial date: report
https://t.co/0dDrU7kYGt
Only the innocent chew their own lawyer’s ass in an half hour rant about a court date he didn’t want. — GoodShepherd (@She10323943) November 2, 2023
Yeah, I don’t feel sorry for the lawyer either. If you work for tRump, you will get yelled at. Also, tRump is mad about the court date because he thinks it will lose him the election. Well, glad he knows he will lose (although probably not the primary). And he is already setting up excuses.
Sidney Powell writes a check!
x Georgia elections official Gabe Sterling held a presser this week, displaying the restitution check Sidney Powell paid to the state after pleading guilty in the Georgia election case.
"It's a small down payment on what should be owed to the voters and the people of Georgia." — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 2, 2023
📚 Man who tried to ban books (esp LGBTQ) now indicted for child molestation Matt Flener, KMBC
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A Gladstone man, who recently spoke in support of banning books from North Kansas City School District libraries that depicted sexual acts, is facing a felony charge of second-degree child molestation and a misdemeanor charge of fourth-degree domestic assault. Ryan Utterback, 29, is also facing a misdemeanor charge of furnishing pornographic material or attempting to furnish to a minor in a separate case.
Whenever they are against something they seem to have done something much worse. Curious as to what will be dug up on Mike Johnson, who mostly got elected because he’s so obscure.
Largest Christian university facing fine for deception Collin Binkley AP via Yahoo News
WASHINGTON (AP) — The country’s largest Christian university is being fined $37.7 million by the federal government amid accusations that it misled students about the cost of its graduate programs. Grand Canyon University, which has more than 100,000 students, mostly in online programs, faces the largest fine of its kind ever issued by the U.S. Education Department. The university dismissed the allegations as “lies and deceptive statements.” “Grand Canyon University categorically denies every accusation in the Department of Education’s statement and will take all measures necessary to defend itself from these false accusations,” the school said in a five-page statement. An Education Department investigation found that Grand Canyon lied to more than 7,500 current and former students about the cost of its doctoral programs
Another fraudster falls:
x "Sam Bankman-Fried went from being a billionaire palling around with Tom Brady in the Bahamas to a broke, convicted fraudster who faces decades behind bars." @MorningBrew //// Too much, too fast, too loose. — they call me 𝙻𝚞𝚌𝚔𝚢 (@markluck) November 3, 2023
📣 Let’s Honor Truth ☀️️
The Rs, who want us to keep shooting each other, at one point would not allow the federal government to collect statistics on gun violence (that has changed, but the data gaps are a problem). But in the meantime, good citizens stepped up, collecting data they could.
Here’s gunviolencearchive.org:
Gun violence and crime incidents are collected/validated from 7,500 sources daily – Incident Reports and their source data are found at the gunviolencearchive.org website.
You can see that gun violence went down from 2021 to 2022.
People also stepped up to help the FBI catch the Jan 6 rioters. They call themselves the Sedition Hunters.
Sedition Hunters is a global community of open-source intelligence investigators (OSINT) working together to assist the U.S. FBI and Washington D.C. Capitol Police in finding people who allegedly committed crimes in the January 6 capitol riots. We examine thousands of hours of videos and hundreds of images searching for individuals who committed crimes on Jan 6, 2021 at the United States Capitol. As we look for those wanted by the FBI we are able to identify other crimes and pass that information along to law enforcement officers.
Over and over, people step up to help when our government is thwarted (gun violence statistics) or is simply overwhelmed (Jan 6 rioters). Way to go, good people!
🌹 Let’s Celebrate Love ❤️
I think health care and education should either be free or at least highly subsidized, because they are, plain and simple, investments in society. Until this happens, medical debt and student debt are huge burdens on individuals. But some organizations are dedicated to wiping these out.
There’s RIP Medical debt, discussed in this NPR piece
Soon after giving birth to a daughter two months premature, Terri Logan received a bill from the hospital. She recoiled from the string of numbers separated by commas. Logan, who was a high school math teacher in Georgia, shoved it aside and ignored subsequent bills. She was a single mom who knew she had no way to pay. "I avoided it like the plague," she says, but avoidance didn't keep the bills out of mind. ✂️ Then a few months ago — nearly 13 years after her daughter's birth and many anxiety attacks later — Logan received some bright yellow envelopes in the mail. They were from a nonprofit group telling her it had bought and then forgiven all those past medical bills. This time, it was a very different kind of surprise: "Wait, what? Who does that?" RIP Medical Debt does. The nonprofit has boomed during the pandemic, freeing patients of medical debt, thousands of people at a time. Its novel approach involves buying bundles of delinquent hospital bills — debts incurred by low-income patients like Logan — and then simply erasing the obligation to repay them.
The article talks about the 6.7 billion they got forgiven, which is surely much more by now, as this article appeared in 2022.
President Biden has been doing what he can to get the student debt burden to be forgiven, but other groups are working on this too. Andy Corbley, Good News Network
From Atlanta comes an uplifting story of nearly 3,000 students getting a brighter future after a debtor organization bought $10 million in student loans for the purpose of canceling it. The total cost of the purchase was one-and-a-quarter pennies for every dollar of debt—with the low value reflecting the likelihood of the university in question—Morehouse College—of recovering it. The purchase from the Historically Black College wiped out the debt for 2,777 students, amounting to around $3,600 dollars of debt per student from the Fall 2022 school term. Debt Collective and the Rolling Jubilee Fund were responsible for the purchase which amounted to the largest in the organizations’ histories.
📎 Odds & Ends 📎
Biden administration approves wind farm off Virginia coast Cristen Hemingway Jaynes EcoWatch
The Biden administration has approved a plan to install as many as 176 large wind turbines off the Virginia Coast. Once finished, the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project, to be constructed by Dominion Energy, will be the largest offshore wind farm in the country. The new project will be located about 23.5 nautical miles off the coast of Virginia Beach and will generate approximately 2,600 megawatts of offshore wind energy, with the capability of powering more than 900,000 homes, a press release from the U.S. Department of the Interior said. The 176 wind turbines of CVOW will each have 14.7 megawatts of capacity.
Abandoned golf courses being rewilded Andy Corbley Good News Network
Near Akron, Ohio, an abandoned golf course has been rewilded into a splendid slice of natural Rustbelt nature that includes a restored section of the now nationally protected Cuyahoga River. Golf courses around the country are being closed faster than they’re being opened, and the vast acreage of the fairway is often reclaimed by nature, but not always by native vegetation. ✂️ “We had to undo the golf course before we could restore the landscape,” said Mike Johnson, chief of conservation at the Summit Metro Parks. “Golf courses are harsh environments, and to create them the vegetation used is usually non-native… It doesn’t have value for our local fish and wildlife.” However big the job was, it offered the non-profit a tremendous opportunity to connect two of its existing properties into a single, 1,900-acre haven for fish, birds, and native plants.
I am really happy about this. I would like to do this with all of the previous guy’s properties.
🐦 I do a lot of other writing. A recent offering: the Crow Nickels (chronicles), a trilogy about crows who want to save birdkind from extinction: Hunters of the Feather, Scavengers of Mind and Familiars of the Flock (They’re really good! They’re really cheap! Buy and review or rate positively! And Hunters is also available on Audible!) Other stories, based on Jane Austen novels — such as The Meryton Murders — and others based on history and Greek mythology, such as Jocasta: The Mother-Wife of Oedipus, can be found here. All titles are available through Kindle Unlimited, but I only get paid if you turn the pages.
💙 What You Can Do to Rescue Democracy 💙
It turns out that participation in democracy is not just an every-four-years event but requires active participation, like, whenever you can find time.
Current projects:
Look in the comments for Progressive Muse’s report on Postcards to Voters
And some other ideas:
You can relax and recharge.
You can join protests and freeway blog.
You can help register new voters.
You can smile.
You can say something nice to friend or a stranger.
You can get out the vote for special elections.
You can reach out to upset Republicans. We need to win some back.
You can share your ideas below.
🌻
💙 “Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we all are created equal and the harsh ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, demonization have long torn us apart. The battle is perennial, and victory is never assured.” 💙
President Joseph R. Biden
🌹 🌹 🌹
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