Democratic Rep Dean Philips admits he's 'thinking' about challenging Biden in 2024 race

Minnesota lawmaker Dean Phillips, says he is “considering” challenging Joe Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary.

“I am thinking about it. I haven’t ruled it out,” Rep Phillips, a Democrat, said on The Warning with Steve Schmidt podcast, but conceded that taking on the president is a “steep slope.”

“I think there are people who are more proximate, better prepared to campaign with national organisations, national name recognition, which I do not possess,” he continued. The 54-year-old congressman has represented Minnesota’s third district since 2019.

He added, “I do feel strongly and I have a conviction that it’s important for democracy to have choices, to have competition, particularly in light of what I’m reading — the polling, the data — and what I’m sensing in my own intuition.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/democratic-rep-dean-philips-admits-he-s-thinking-about-challenging-biden-in-2024-race/ar-AA1hfbWZ?ocid=msedgdhphdr&cvid=126398efee8546399dcfbace6e249f05&ei=8

Archeologists discover 2,000-year-old child's shoe with laces intact

Source: CNN

A shoe belonging to a child and dating back more than 2,000 years has been unearthed in Austria with its laces still intact.

The design of the leather shoe, whose size roughly corresponds to EU 30 (US 12), suggests it was likely made in the 2nd century BC, according to the German Mining Museum Bochum-Leibniz Research Museum for Geo-resources.

The shoe was excavated by archeologists in the western village of Dürrnberg, where rock salt mining took place from as early as the Iron Age, it said in a recent press release.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/20/world/archeologists-discover-ancient-child-shoe-intl-scli-scn/index.html?utm_source=twCNN&utm_term=link&utm_medium=social&utm_content=2023-09-21T11%3A45%3A08

Are you kidding me?!': Lawmaker calls out Jim Jordan at hearing

Braindead Trump: Dems bringing back COVID to "rig" 2024 election

That heatwave is about to end in the Lone Star State

Tropical Storm Lee forecast to strengthen into hurricane as it churns in Atlantic toward Caribbean

Source: Associated Press

Tropical Storm Lee churned through the open waters of the Atlantic on Wednesday and was expected to soon become a hurricane as it approached the Caribbean.

The storm was located about 1,265 miles (2,040 kilometers) east-southeast of the northern Leeward Islands. It had maximum sustained winds of 65 mph (100 kph) and was moving west-northwest at 14 mph (22 kph), according to the National Hurricane Center.

It was not forecast to make landfall, but it is projected to pass just northeast of the British Virgin Islands, which is still recovering from hurricanes Maria and Irma that hit in September 2017.

Lee is expected to become a hurricane later Wednesday and develop into a major hurricane in a couple of days.

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/tropical-storm-lee-hurricane-caribbean-cf47aaee3bfd5119a1df40583e66c289

Alabama Will Charge People With Criminal Conspiracy For Helping Women Travel For Abortions

'Death Star law' to abortion: the new rightwing laws taking effect in Texas

Source: The Guardian

On Friday, the Republican-controlled legislature in Texas will dump an avalanche of virulent new laws on the state’s 30 million residents, cementing its reputation as a hotbed of the far-right turmoil that is sweeping America.

Hundreds of laws will come into effect as the product of the legislative session that Texas holds every two years. Among them are a number of highly controversial targeted bills that will have a seismic impact on some of the most vulnerable Texan communities.

They include measures attacking the rights and healthcare of transgender Texans, undermining the autonomy of progressive cities such as Houston, extending the state’s prohibition of abortion, pushing back on efforts to combat rising heat amid the climate crisis, and more.

The Republican group that controls both houses of the Texas legislature has been emboldened by favourable election results in 2022 that showed little or no backlash to their radical rightwing agenda of a year before. The introduction of an almost total abortion ban after Roe v Wade was overturned also appears to have inflicted minimal damage on the party’s standing.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/01/texas-new-laws-republican-legislature

What will be Trump's final message on his Truth Social platform?

Seriously, what do you think it will be?

Is Industrial Society on the Verge of Collapse?

Source: Common Dreams

In his 2005 bestseller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, geographer Jared Diamond focused on past civilizations that confronted severe climate shocks, either adapting and surviving or failing to adapt and disintegrating. Among those were the Puebloan culture of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, the ancient Mayan civilization of Mesoamerica, and the Viking settlers of Greenland. Such societies, having achieved great success, imploded when their governing elites failed to adopt new survival mechanisms to face radically changing climate conditions.

Bear in mind that, for their time and place, the societies Diamond studied supported large, sophisticated populations. Pueblo Bonito, a six-story structure in Chaco Canyon, contained up to 600 rooms, making it the largest building in North America until the first skyscrapers rose in New York some 800 years later. Mayan civilization is believed to have supported a population of more than 10 million people at its peak between A.D. 250 and 900, while the Norse Greenlanders established a distinctively European society around A.D. 1000 in the middle of a frozen wasteland. Still, in the end, each collapsed utterly and their inhabitants either died of starvation, slaughtered each other, or migrated elsewhere, leaving nothing but ruins behind.

The question today is: Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland?

Diamond identified three key indicators or precursors of imminent dissolution: a persistent pattern of environmental change for the worse like long-lasting droughts; signs that existing modes of agriculture or industrial production were aggravating the crisis; and an elite failure to abandon harmful practices and adopt new means of production.


https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/is-society-on-the-verge-of-collapse?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=CommonDreams%2Fmagazine%2FLatest+Opinion